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Don't Spend More, Spend Better | Wellist CEO Ashley Reid
11 Plays1 month ago
In this episode of The Healthcare Theory, we sit down with Ashley Reid, founder and CEO of Wellist, a platform that connects patients and employees to personalized support services, from childcare to mental health.
Ashley shares her journey from a corporate strategy leader to an innovative entrepreneur determined to reshape the healthcare landscape. She dives into Wellist’s mission to create systems that ensure patients and employees find the right resources, ranging from childcare to mental health support, exactly when they need them. We discuss how her team has built a platform designed to systematize support services and why reallocating resources, not just spending more, is the real solution to improving healthcare outcomes. Tune in to learn how Wellist is bridging the gap between clinical care and social determinants of health, ensuring people get the holistic care they deserve.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome
Introduction to Healthcare Theory Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
to the healthcare theory podcast. I'm your host Nikhil Reddy and every week we interview the entrepreneurs and thought leaders behind the future of healthcare care to see what's gone wrong with our system and how we can fix it.
00:00:14
Speaker
On today's
Ashley Reed and Wellist Overview
00:00:15
Speaker
episode, we're speaking with Ashley Reed, the founder and CEO of Wellist. Wellist is a resource matching platform that aggregates a variety of support services such as childcare, pharmacy services, and much, much more to provide a more personalized, easy to access experience for employers and healthcare providers. So hi, Ashley. Thanks so much for coming on today and welcome to the healthcare theory. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Yeah, of course. And I'm i'm really excited to get into where your air background and how you started the company and what you guys provide. But before we get into all of that, could you start by telling more about like your background and what brought you into entrepreneurship and healthcare?
Ashley's Career Journey
00:00:54
Speaker
Yeah. So this was not the dream. Although I have many, many friends who are like, I want to be a CEO and start a company. and My ah first early experience was actually ah in consumer marketing and activation. So I started at Hill Holiday, which is the big ad agency here in Boston.
00:01:12
Speaker
buying media for accounts like Dunkin' Donuts and Fox. And ah then I went and ran um loyalty email campaigns at Staples selling pink paper and ink. So like, how do you write an email? How do you ah send a postcard to someone's house and get them to show up at Staples to buy a ream of paper? And so my first sort of career was really in that activation and engagement space.
00:01:40
Speaker
Um, I went home to Carnegie Mellon when my mom was diagnosed with cancer, uh, to go to grad school. So I got my MBA at the Tepper school of business at Carnegie Mellon university. And after that did what still feels like my real job, like big corporate strategy and biz dev with companies like Bain and company bridge span and five years at Phillips healthcare.
00:02:03
Speaker
And I really loved my big happy corporate life.
Origin Story of Wellist
00:02:06
Speaker
But while I was doing that work, ah my best friend's father died of cancer and she went into preterm labor within 24 hours of her dad dying. And it was really horrible. And, ah you know, not just I have ah ah baby in the NICU and have to plan a funeral, but like how does the toddler get to school and how does dinner get on the table? It was pretty excruciating in that moment. And so honestly at the time I was just like, there's this thing called the internet that should not be so hard because Mass General Brigham is all the support and we live in Boston with all of these resources. Like why can she not find what she needs? And so um I originally
00:02:50
Speaker
left my big happy life ah at Phillips HealthCare to build a business that would help connect cancer patients to a right resource at the right time. And our first client was Mass General Hospital. And over about a six-year period prior to the pandemic, we grew that business to serve 550 hospitals and address every department in a health system.
00:03:14
Speaker
That's, that's really impressive. And I, yeah, I know. I think when I came across you guys's website, I was surprised it hasn't been done yet because I can imagine how stressful it is. Like you have so many different things you have to worry about and why is it not a single website to cover all of it. And
Entrepreneurial Challenges and Lessons
00:03:28
Speaker
before we get into that, so you're focused on patient engagement.
00:03:31
Speaker
and making sure that we're not patient engagement and increasing engagement for customers and getting people more engaged with stuff. And then that was a big corporations where you kind of siloed less freedom. i Like why and what's challenges were and what brought you to entrepreneurship and why was that a bit like what skills helped you out in that area? e Yeah. I mean, everything comes full circle in the end and you can't you can't see it until you're working in the back mirror. So like all of the nuts and bolts like activation stuff that I learned in my first couple of jobs are like how I create value for clients today. Um, but I actually had to unlearn a lot of what I learned. So, um, I mean, I worked for Bain and company and got really good at how do you look at a problem and figure out what is the most important priority that unlocks the value.
00:04:30
Speaker
But, and then I went to Phillips and I was in a strategy role. So I thought whatever I put on a PowerPoint was the answer. yeah oh dude ah When you start your own company, and especially when you start your own company doing something totally new. And what we were doing was.
00:04:51
Speaker
had never been done before, which is we want a system where people can come in, give a little bit of information and find exactly what they need. And while that existed in other industries, it did not exist at all in healthcare care and now also in employers. And so you have to try a lot of things and fail and try a lot of things. So whereas in consulting and in in strategy roles, you're like, I'm going to think about this and come with the answer.
00:05:21
Speaker
When you're
Innovations in Data-Driven Personalization
00:05:22
Speaker
when you're literally doing new things you might try 100 times before it works and you just have to like tweak another thing and try and tweak another thing and try. So the process for building a business is in many ways different than what made me successful in my.
00:05:41
Speaker
corporate life, but I will say the ability to look at a problem and there are always a hundred things that have to be done today, but to be able to zero in on, these are the three that if we don't do them, they break the ship. So let's make sure we do those really well. That has been a skill that I built in ah corporate strategy and consulting that certainly helps me do my job today as an entrepreneur.
00:06:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. I think in both roles, entrepreneurship or a strategy, you're trying to do some problem, understand what's going on. But now as an entrepreneur, you actually have to implement it, be iterative about it. And you can't just like tell them what to do and then take a step back and be right. And i mean when you got there, so... You kind of, so you realize what happened with your best friend and it must have been hard to manage all those different services. I mean, do you have any insight into why these like nonclinical services were so overlooked beforehand and like really just why has no one done this before?
00:06:42
Speaker
Because it's hard. It's like a bunch of little things like, um, so we grew to support 550 hospitals and then COVID hit and we could not be on site. So we lost almost all of our hospital business. Yeah. And what we found was the nurses were hacking our programs to get resources for themselves in the middle of COVID. And that's very interesting because, um,
00:07:08
Speaker
Employers were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on things like childcare and mental health support for essential workers. But to access that support, a nurse had to authenticate into a VPN, click 12 times to get to a landing page, and she would have a link to her health plan and a link to the EAP and a link to the diabetes management program, a link to the vision plan. But let's say I need hearing aids.
00:07:34
Speaker
I don't know when I hit that page that the best hearing aids are in the vision plan. I'm not looking in the vision plan for hearing aids. And so part of it is a it's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of little things that you need to systematize.
00:07:53
Speaker
The second is it took us six years to write a data model to know, for example, that if you're a 36 year old breast cancer patient, chemotherapy is going to impact your fertility. So you need a fertility recommendation. To be able to do that for every single clinical diagnosis takes years to build. And most people just don't have the access to be in a hospital, rounding with nurses, and to get that patient data back to be able to build a technology like ours. So
Limitations of AI in Personalization
00:08:27
Speaker
because the personalization drives the value, a lot of it is just about ah being able to have the opportunity to even build that data set in the first place.
00:08:40
Speaker
Yeah, no, that definitely makes sense. And it's kind of interesting with these like companies that are using AI and machine learning and like automated processes that data is often becoming like the real value behind it. I mean, you started this quite a while ago and yeah I think AI and all that stuff was much smaller back then. How's your approach to data acquisition and that like type of ROM changed over time? Yeah. Well, there are things that AI can do and there are things that AI cannot do. Yeah.
00:09:08
Speaker
use AI to accelerate our processes and tooling to do what we do better. So what I mean by that is we curate lists of resources. We can use AI to do that better than a human can do. If I have the data that tells them how to do it, what to train it on, as it turns out, I have a decade of data that no one else has. Well, that can get done better.
00:09:35
Speaker
What AI cannot do, but a lot of people are assuming it can, is actually know what you need. Because if I'm pregnant and my colleague's pregnant and my friend is pregnant, AI would say, oh, I know what pregnant people need. You need this, this, and this. But the reality is if I'm pregnant and I have three other kids and my friend is pregnant and she has an aging parent,
00:10:04
Speaker
And my third friend is pregnant, but she just has limited financial resources. We might need two or three things that are the same, but in reality, of the 15 things that each of us needs, there's more that is different than is the same. And so we never use AI to assume we know what you need. We can do the infinite number of configurations to do that matching so that you can always get the best resources.
00:10:34
Speaker
for you, which are are personalized by where you live or where you think. So I think we have to be very careful about what AI can do and what it can't do. It can help us do things faster, are smarter, better, but it should never assume that it knows ah what real humans want and need.
00:10:57
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that's also an interesting point. Like you're trying to limit these biases where like just because one person exists, two, three, four, five, all don't need the same thing. And I know you've got you've talked about more ah before about like social determinants of health. You kind of elaborate more on like what that means for the audience. And
Social Determinants of Health
00:11:14
Speaker
how do you guys incorporate that into WeList and try to like remove these biases and ensure that people actually get what they need, even though they like they might not even know what they need. That's yeah probably a pretty hard problem, but curious your thoughts. It's actually not that hard if you do it right. Right. So social determinants is at its most broad level, a concept that says my health is not just about my medical care. What happens when I go to the doctor? How does the orthopedic surgeon treat me? My health is also
00:11:52
Speaker
determined by a bunch of social factors that have nothing to do with my clinical experience. So I'm gonna use knee surgery because I've had two. On my second patella realignment, I went home and I had a dog that would pull me forward. I lived alone on a fifth floor walk up in the back bay. When I watched the dog, the dog would pull me forward and I would land on my knee.
00:12:19
Speaker
I lived alone on a fifth floor walk up. So how does the groceries get done? And how do the laundry get done? And so um my ability to manage my life meant that I didn't do a great job on managing my knee recovery. And as a result, I was in physical therapy for three years. And so social determinants basically says we cannot, that basically 80% of health outcomes are tied to unmet social needs. And this is especially true for people who are lower income. So social determinants frequently is used specifically for what we call the the most at-risk, largest, who don't have access to food, who don't have access to housing. But at its core, everybody has social needs. And my health and your health is also
00:13:18
Speaker
you determined by the things that happen in our life. How stressful is our job? How how healthy is our partner relationship with our partner? Wellist allows us to integrate all of the types of supports people need. so I need access to a massage therapist or a physical therapist, but I also need someone to deliver groceries because I can't do that while I'm in Precious and I need someone to walk the dog. right And so what our product does is it allows somebody to come for one or two things, because this is always, happening nobody's thinking of everything they need, right? They're thinking of the most popular category for someone who's pregnant is meal delivery, because dinner with small children is a pain point. And ay you have to serve dinner seven days a week.
00:14:11
Speaker
So it happens a lot and it's not awesome. And so I don't have to say to a mom, you need a therapist. I can say a baby is a miracle. Sometimes so too is a hot meal on the table. Let us help you with that. And so they come for meal delivery and usually one other thing like childcare or breastfeeding. But if you show them all of the support that's available to them in a way that aligns with their needs, not aligned with the vendor,
00:14:41
Speaker
So what I mean by that, I'm not gonna show them the vision plan. I'm gonna say, do you need hearing support? Do you need financial assistance? Do you need ah mental health resources? And we can connect them directly to the resources that are most specific to them. What we see in the data, if you enable them to choose, I want this, this, this, this, and this, they come for one or two things, but they get connected to eight to 15 resources.
00:15:09
Speaker
And so that is the opportunity of being able to walk people to the social supports that can help them be healthier. Yeah. And that's actually how they, yeah, that makes sense because you're actually increasing engagement. They know what's actually out there. And does it ever get overwhelming if you're coming on for a couple of services? Like how do you guys present the data and all this information, these services in a way where it's not overwhelming. They're coming on for maybe one or two services. They don't want to see like 15 things. Like, Oh, I don't, this is too confusing. How do you guys present this in like an approachable way? Yeah. I mean, this,
00:15:42
Speaker
Somebody has solved this problem before. Many people have. They're called Amazon or Staples, yeah right? Where you put in a little bit of information of what do I need? You give a little bit of information about what are, you know, I'm this old. I live in this s zip code. I'm pregnant or have breast cancer. And you click a button that can't take longer than like a minute and a half. This is what I need. Click, click, click.
00:16:08
Speaker
This is a little bit about me. And then you match the recommendations. When we show the screen for every category that they selected, like home cleaning, we only show four recommendations. And we've ranked those based on the information that we've already gotten, similar to like when you get your Amazon ah recommendations.
00:16:32
Speaker
And then, similar to Amazon or Kayak, I can then further refine. So I can say, I only want things that are five miles from my house, or I want things that are free first, or I want things that are closer to home first. And so those recommendations regenerate so that I see that the best match for me within the first two or three resources.
00:16:55
Speaker
And so that is how we literally take the best practices of all of the shopping engines and make sure that you can find exactly what you need in a way that feels like shopping on Amazon. Yeah. Now that's really cool. I love that analogy with Amazon. Cause you see Amazon, I mean, it's it's easy to understand everything's basically on there and you want to do the same thing with wireless where everything you need is basically on there.
00:17:21
Speaker
But it's not like you use but the product. You're going to put it on there as a views and stuff like that. It's kind of black and white. You know how good it might be. And it's like, if you order a shoe in Amazon and it's bad, it's okay. You lost $90, but you don't want to go to like a bad service provider, right? So how do you guys vet these, sorry, vet these partnerships and make sure they're like actually like high quality and things that I'll be like people that will help other people.
Quality Assurance in Partnerships
00:17:45
Speaker
Yeah. This is where all the money and wellness is, if I'm being very honest, which is we've built.
00:17:51
Speaker
that those vetting requirements across 70 categories over the course of a decade. For example, there are four ways you can credential Adula. And so what we know, there are state accreditations for home care agencies, et cetera. So first and foremost, we start with the list of vetted services and make sure that they have the right, google like if it's a restaurant, you might be able to use Google reviews, right? But for physical therapists, you need a specific certification.
00:18:20
Speaker
And then in every category, we build the content specific to that accreditation or or vetting criteria. And we also not only say you're accredited, but we say things like take grocery delivery, which you know Google ratings or Yelp ratings can be a proxy for quality.
00:18:45
Speaker
It's not just as easy of like, what is the thing? Cause if I'm a breast cancer patient and I just had a mastectomy, I can't just refer somebody to Instacart because if Instacart drops the groceries downstairs, I physically can't lift them and carry them upstairs.
00:19:00
Speaker
And so I need to have a filter that says, will you unpack the bags? This is where a decade in health care really helps you. And so what we did is we started with the data set. We then call and vet every single listing to make sure that the experience is good, that their credentials are up to date. And then we augment the data with things that allow us to better personalize results for the end user. So for example, you call a massage therapist. The questions are, are you certified ah for giving a ah massage to someone with cancer or somebody who is pregnant, right? And so those are the level of credentialings that are specific to each, what we call category of support to make sure that
00:19:49
Speaker
listings are up to date relevant. And then we literally hit their sites every night. So every night we're checking to make sure that those ah resources are still live. Wow, that that's that's really awesome. That makes a lot of sense because it must have taken so long. But now that you're like like almost like a decade in, you have like so much data that I guess no one can compete. And like if someone wants those services, well, this is the best platform to go to.
00:20:15
Speaker
But I know like in the past like few years or in the past like almost decade or so, you guys have kind of pivoted it a bit and you guys started in hospitals and now are focusing on employers. Can you kind of talk about that change and what kind of motivated it and motivated the pivot?
00:20:29
Speaker
The answer is
Strategic Pivot to Employers
00:20:30
Speaker
just listen. Just listen to what people ask and do. And so we were in the hospitals, and as you might imagine, we were getting such, we got 10X engagement rates for our clients, but we were rounding at the point of care. And it was good enough that we didn't have to do anything else in 2020 until it wasn't, because you can't be in a hospital in an infusion bay or an inpatient room in the middle of COVID. And so we lost almost all of our business, but the ah nurses started hacking our patient programs for support. And we're like, this doesn't make any sense. They already have access to these resources. But what we learned was it was so hard for them to access them because they were buried on an internet page and nobody knew what was available to them. and so
00:21:20
Speaker
What we found was this technology that we built for patients could actually slide over to personalize recommendations for what's buried in your benefits portfolio. And when we zoomed out at the market, what we learned was three out of four employees aren't using the resources that their company is providing for them. And companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on this support. So it's a top five budget item for most companies, and three out of four employees are not using them. That is like setting money on fire. And so as it just turns out, this technology that took us a decade to build, to your point,
00:22:01
Speaker
ah We won Fast Company's most innovative company of the year for HR this year. And I'm like, nothing was innovative in 2024. It was a decade of grinding it out, sending resources home with patients, understanding the data model, tweaking the filters. That is what is so unique about what we have now. But um we really just had to listen. When our world blew up and our company blew up, we had to listen to like what is Where is there a poll for what we're providing? And then we just pulled the thread. And we learned that HR is responsible for employee well-being and cost. And our technology can help their employees get five times more support than they're doing today. And it can create data that tells them how to reduce their operating costs by 20%.
00:22:52
Speaker
So honestly, we're not smart. We're just, we were so unlucky that we got really lucky to hit on something that is a very big problem for many companies across the country. It's like COVID kind of kicked you to like an even better problem to solve.
00:23:07
Speaker
Yeah. That's kind of cool because I guess like when you're working with these hospitals, like your goal is to have the best patient experience. But now with employers, like you have a whole different thing. You have to want to reduce like employee turnover, which costs like so much money to deal with. And I bet employers like would really love to have a product like this. um But how do you pivot to them? like it's kind of like How do you like grow and maintain these partnerships and tell them employers what this really is and show they don't actually they work what they offer?
00:23:35
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the pitch is is effectively this, like you're spending money on things that three out of four employees don't use. I want to get you four or five times more value on what you're spending money on today. And I want to show you explicitly how to reduce your costs. And then when we go live, we itemize everything in their benefits portfolio. So one of my clients that's implementing now, we were able to find 80% of our fees in redundancies.
00:24:03
Speaker
Really? In effect, they were double paying for things that just by telling them, you can stop paying for this. they can't just like They have paid for 80% of our program, even before they go live. Then we get a bunch of data on what employees really want and need. And so they can further refine their portfolios on what am I spending money on and how do I spend it better? Or do I not need to spend money on, for example, childcare because the data shows me employees prefer the childcare down the street than this other offering that I'm paying for today. And then as you describe, we drive real value in terms of reducing healthcare costs and helping people stay in their jobs. Because if I don't have childcare or I don't have transportation, like I'm missing my shift. And so our ability to make sure that people have what they need so that they can be productive at work is sort of the thing. So we guarantee the ah ROI.
00:25:03
Speaker
We basically say, you will have hard dollar savings greater to the cost of our program. And we'll guarantee that over the course of the contract. Yeah. Well, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I mean, it makes you want to get rid of all the redundancies.
00:25:19
Speaker
But also, like I know, I mean, you're probably definitely mission-driven, and a lot of people in healthcare are, but the actual employers, HR, they kind of want to just save money and like not waste too much on their budget sometimes. What kind of draws the line is like what's this what makes the service redundant? Not redundant, sorry. What makes the service like not worth it to a company? ah Yeah. You talked about like a childcare example, right? like Maybe it's useful to a couple people, but to the other 90 people in the organization,
00:25:45
Speaker
They don't need it. Like what kind of draws the line where yeah you want to keep the service or you don't, doesn't really fit their offerings anymore. The data, the data gives you the answer. So like, and we had a client who had two childcare offerings and they wanted to have choice, but we augmented and added in community resources. And then we looked at the data and 55% of the employees actually ended up preferring the community resource.
00:26:12
Speaker
And so now when we look at the 45 that are left over, we say, are they behaviorally different? Are they demographically different? And what do they prefer? Well, as it turns out, everyone preferred the first to the second. And so they could cut the second program, actually provide much more choice for employees that they actually prefer, but they don't have to pay for that program. I have a client today that has resources buried in their health plan for behavioral health.
00:26:42
Speaker
They have a behavioral health service, and then they have a telehealth service with behavioral health resources. So as these solutions have added more features and functions and capabilities, there's more and more overlap.
00:26:56
Speaker
on what it's provided. And so I can say, you can serve the mental health needs of everybody who is on this solution today, you just have to navigate them to the other solution. So you're not cutting any services, you're just directing them to the resource that's most strategic for both employee wellbeing and the cost of the organization. So it's more about like, yeah. Yeah.
00:27:25
Speaker
That's the beauty of ah integrating community resources is you don't have to take something away. You can actually get employees five times more support yeah ah and I think that's awesome. That's the cool thing about technology is that like, I mean back maybe like 20 years ago, if you want to make like healthcare care and put like resources, like you just have to it require you to spend more money, but now you kind of improve the resources available while still like saving money.
00:27:51
Speaker
which I think is awesome about AI. I mean, not just AI, but like technology as a whole. Did you kind of like see that, foresee that when you first got into Wellness and were at CMU or was that kind of something you realized on the way? yeah um So I trained and almost finished my Masters of Social Work at Boston College when I was working in the, like I did that as a night program after my MBA.
00:28:18
Speaker
And I really appreciated that the current model was to have a person who knew what the resources were. So if you needed support, you had to come to me and I had to like tell you what are the services that are relevant to you. And there's lots of challenges with that. Most notably is like, you may not tell me everything you need, but also like I i cannot afford to give a social worker to everyone who needs support. Like if if we have to put a human in the middle,
00:28:46
Speaker
i It's not going to work. And so one of our first clients had a team of 15 community resource specialists that they had cut to three. And it came to us after that and we're like, can you help with the technology to like fill this gap? What was interesting is when we enabled self-service, the team didn't just serve 3% of patients like they did when they were fully staffed. They served 25% of patients.
00:29:15
Speaker
And each patient went from getting two to three resources to getting 12 to 15. Like just think about that. Like I can cut the team to 20%. I can serve of six to eight times more people and each person is going to get four and a half times more support than they did in this model. And so if you really think about empowerment, which is a key goal of social work, not everyone is going to be able to do this on their own, but many, if not most can.
00:29:43
Speaker
And so if you give them the right tools, they can get connected to the support that they need anytime, anywhere. And so, yes, I think I really understood that the value of the technology is in really eliminating work to be done, right? Not just making it better, easier for a social worker to do what they are, but to really change the the dynamic of where the work is being done, which is as close to the patient and close to the employee as possible, so that you're actually taking work off of that individual so that they can then practice at the top of their license.
00:30:24
Speaker
Okay. Yeah, I really appreciate that background. and That's interesting. And interestingly, like solving that problem. And it seems like over time, I mean, the products just get better and better because you'll have like better data, more time to venue providers, more services to be offered. And like, it's a pretty changing landscape, like technologies become more prevalent, more people might hear about solutions like these, like how do you picture it while it's changing over to the next maybe like one to three years and like adapting to like this new environment, new new needs from employers and things like that. Do you see like any big strategic shifts or? Yeah, what I would say is when you build a company, you spend the first part of it building the widget, like whatever your product is. Then the second part of what you do is you actually build the company and you basically have to build every function
00:31:12
Speaker
as if it's its own product. Like how do I sell? Like what is the what is the process? What is the tools? What are the people to sell? And how do you build a community resource directory? And so to some extent what you're trying to design for is you want the that operations to be so so tight that even if someone comes in and isn't that great, they still by default have to get to a great experience.
00:31:42
Speaker
Right. And so where I see Wellist investing now is we are are very disciplined in building the operating systems so that the hundredth client gets as good of experience as the 10th client. And so um that takes a lot of discipline and where you're applying technology is not actually in your widget, but it's applying technology into you know, what is the technology that we use for the call center rep to give the script in the best possible way? Or what is the technology that when you're calling and vetting listings gets us the best quality data? So that is where I think at least in the next year, like we are making major, major investments to ensure quality as we scale.
00:32:34
Speaker
Okay. Yeah, that's definitely interesting because i mean as you scale, yeah usually what happens with a lot of companies, they scale up, but don't really change the infrastructure behind it. So then the actual value of the product kind of falls behind. It's good to hear the guys are mitigating that and kind of getting ahead of the curve.
00:32:50
Speaker
um No, that's really interesting. And I think I was a little curious. so I mean, I was wondering if you had like, so I mean, like what you guys have done with the real estate is really cool. And you guys are definitely going like a really great track to kind of scale up, provide better services, have better data. But if you could kind of take a step back and you'd be like 10 years ago, when you first started this company, do you have any advice for yourself on kind of how you, would you would you ever approach this differently or or any advice for people trying to get into like entrepreneurship and healthcare care in general?
00:33:19
Speaker
Yeah.
Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
00:33:20
Speaker
So the first thing I was told was to build a pitch deck and go raise money. And that was terrible advice. and i I almost didn't get the company off the ground because I was literally a professional business planner. It's what I had done for a decade.
00:33:35
Speaker
ah But there's not a lot of data when you have a new idea. So I was like calling call centers and trying to get like, why are cancer patients calling you? But that's very different than I'm going to build something from my imagination and try and make it live and breathe in the world. So I also felt like it was all about me, right? Like I needed to solve the problem, put it on paper, and then go take it to the world to either get a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
00:34:05
Speaker
And I would say that was probably one of the most vulnerable like mental and emotional health experiences I had on my entrepreneurship journey. And somebody said to me, if you had the money, what would you do? And I was like, I'd go get a client. And that led me to talk to an administrative director at Mass General Hospital. And she wrote me a six-figure contract with just an idea. like So it was revenue. It was not equity. And so my learning was I used i was sitting at the table like every day trying to like think, think, think, think harder. And my advice to entrepreneurs, especially if they're like really trying to build something net new, is to not talk to an investor for the first 30 days. Talk to 30 people in your first 30 days.
00:35:00
Speaker
who can help you build a business. They should be potential clients. They should be co-founders. They should be suppliers. They should be industry experts. They should be other entrepreneurs. And so if you talk to 30 people in 30 days, when you come back to the paper,
00:35:18
Speaker
on what are you going to build, you have learned so much. You're spared actually months or years of learning because you frontend you've gotten that information on the front end. And so um i would I would certainly say that that was one of the most important learnings, which is to get out of your house, get out of your head, go talk to the market, figure out what you need to build, and then come back to work on a business plan and capital. That makes a lot of sense. That's great advice. yeah I think it's like really important to focus on actually like building that product, building your company first. Because investors have like their own box. They kind of see their company that companies should be in.
00:36:01
Speaker
They don't really know like what the data really is and what it should be. And I was also curious, you're focused on building a product, building a team, I'm sorry, building a product and building a company. How did you process like approach building a team and building someone that, a team of people that could really support you in what you're doing and provide value or you don't really have? Yeah. I mean, my first hire was like an engineer and I knew nothing about engineering.
00:36:23
Speaker
So I ended up on a hackathon to go literally, I have now a contract and I need to find someone who can build the thing that's in my head. And I i went to the hackathon to be a participant and my group fell apart, but because of my professional experience, they asked me to stay and be a mentor.
00:36:43
Speaker
And I was helping this group. And finally, they're like, well, what do you do for real? And so I told them, like I used to do this, but I have an idea, and I'm going to try and do this. And the and an engineer out of MIT raised his hand. It was amazing. And he's like, I'm interested in this. And so he ended up being a technical co-founder to build the thing. So you need to understand like what are the pieces that you need around the table. And then what I've learned,
00:37:14
Speaker
We deploy an operating system called EOS. And when they think about people, they basically do an assessment of do they get it? Do they want it? And do they have the capacity to do it? And so now as we're building a team, we're really thoughtful on are we clear on what we need this job to do? And as the person who we're putting in to own it, do they under do they get it, right? Do they actually want that job? um And then You know, do they have the capacity to do that? And the in a startup, the real constraint there is I've given one person two jobs. They can't do two jobs at the same time. They actually can't be successful to do the thing I need them to do because they have too much on their plate. So to that's sort of the operating framework that we use now, now that we're scaling up to make sure we have the right people in the right seats.
00:38:06
Speaker
Yeah. I know that makes a lot of sense. It was an interesting question because I know like interesting answer because like your whole company is about like helping employees. So it was interesting to hear how you approach like managing and building your own employees and just for the audience. So that's
Closing Remarks and Future Content
00:38:21
Speaker
going to wrap up our second episode, well now our fourth episode at the healthcare theory. But I really want to say thank you so much Ashley for coming on. I'm super excited to see where things go with Wellness.
00:38:32
Speaker
is a lot of potential and a lot of places you guys can scale and it's gonna be super exciting. But yeah, thanks so much for coming on today. I really appreciate the opportunity and congratulations on the podcast. It's so exciting. So look forward to following your success.
00:38:48
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Healthcare Theory. Every Tuesday, expect a new episode on the platform of your choice. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, any streaming platform you can imagine. We'll also be posting more short-form educational content on Instagram and TikTok. And if you really want to learn more about what's gone wrong with healthcare care and how you can help, check out our blog at thehealthcaretheory.org. Repeat thehealthcaretheory.org. Again, I appreciate you tuning in and I hope to see you again soon.