Scaling a Business with Steve Gallion

nknown Speaker 0:00
Come on

Unknown Speaker 0:11
Bob Leffler. This is George G. And the time is right welcome today’s guest strong and powerful Steve Galleon, Steve, are you ready to do this? I’m ready to jump in George. All right, let’s go. Steve is the CEO of med trainer. He’s serial entrepreneur, he is committed to making things and processes better through innovation. Steve, tell us a little about your personal life some more about your work and why you do what you do. Great. Yeah, awesome. So thanks for having me on the show. For the better part of the last 15 years, I’ve focused most of my career on building residual income style businesses within the healthcare and market. So to give you kind of a little bit of business glimpse in the background, my co founder and I have done several different companies together, our last exit was in 2013, different industry different space. But same market, it was actually in the healthcare medical waste industry. But it spun up an idea and showed us a gap that we had found in compliance, which we found heavy layers of conviction, specifically related to education, not just at the provider level, but kind of top to bottom within health care.

Steve Gallion 1:22
And so we went after it, so to speak, right. And that’s kind of how METRON was born, the problem was actually quite a bit bigger than learning. It spans across three core areas of focus today. And so we kind of born and raised in the educational world and learning management space. And now we consider ourselves more of a healthcare GRC provider. So that’s kind of a newer emerging governance RISK COMPLIANCE market in in healthcare, covering education, compliance, and credentialing, which compliance is a lot of different tool sets around automation, things like incident, management, policy and procedure management. credentialing is kind of where legal and HR meet this inflection point for providers. If you imagine yourself as a doctor, and I’m a hospital, and we are hiring you, we are probably not just going to take your word for it that you went to Harvard. And now you practice, you know, plastic surgery. And we’re going to have to do a little bit of a deeper dig there. And we need to document that we did that deep dive into your credentials. And so that’s the credentialing process. And although it sounds fairly simplistic, it’s highly complex, and highly variable. And there’s a lot of challenges that organizations throughout the scale of healthcare, whether it’s a single provider group all the way up through, you know, hundreds or 1000s of provider health systems, they face similar challenges. And we are really on a mission to do one thing. And that’s to use technology to help automate and promote efficiency across those three core buckets of problem solving.

Where that’s unique is today, we put all of that natively under one roof. So we haven’t built our system through acquisition or acquiring other kind of core components. Everything has been built within the same code base, which allows for us to have a lot of cross cross functional features and interactivity within the system. That’s a very big differentiator between our platform and some others out there, I’m super happy to announce we just closed

a very important funding round that was led by VISTA Equity Partners, and also telescope partners, which did our Series A participated in in this round. So we did a $43 million raise on Series B. And our goal is to really put that money to work to build out the best product that can really drive that core mission that I spoke about and create a lot more connective tissue between our core technology and the value points that our customers have come to expect. On the personal side. I’m 37 years old, married two kids. Home base for me is Las Vegas, Nevada. moved there a few years ago from California, as you know, a lot of us in this space are looking to accomplish certain personal goals and that was on my personal agenda. I have a daughter who’s 14 My son is seven. My 14 year old is a competitive athlete. my seven year old son is more of a virtual athlete on fortnight and Roblox and whatever else, you know, seven year old boys are into but he’s also outside and soccer playing soccer and I tried to get out there on the field with him as well. And it’s been a lot of my personal life when I’m not traveling for business focused around family and in the promotion of my core kind of goals and morals within within my my family itself. Though, extra background academically. I went to University of California Riverside degrees in business economics and then later I went to law

score. Although I had no goals or aspirations for practicing law, it was really to be more highly complementary to,

to more of the entrepreneurial spirit. Matter of fact, I’d highly recommend those who are chasing different goals as a founder. If you had to make a decision between, let’s say, getting your MBA or getting your juris doctorate, I think the JD route is is highly beneficial, especially in today’s world where things have become so legally entangled with the processes. So little bit of background there. Hopefully that helps. Yeah. Well, congratulations on on raising the new funding. That’s, that’s awesome. Thank you. Thank you. And I appreciate I appreciate the background. It’s always fascinating to learn about different industries and the entrepreneurial journey, some things that sort of jumped into mind with health care. So so many sensitive issues with privacy and and things like that. How does one get credentialed to give credentials? Is that a hard process? That’s a good? It’s a good question. And it’s it is a little bit fragmented. Being that the process itself doesn’t have a specific oversight body.

Unknown Speaker 6:17
The oversight bodies that are really going in and regulating this are going to be around the insurance payers and then accreditation bodies. And then at the very top level, you have CMS, who if you are CMS, CMS certified organization, you are kind of bound by their guidelines, there is a loose oversight by an organization called NCQA that does have some really good standards and processes that we drive to abide by. But there isn’t a official certification of being able to be certified, there are certifications you can achieve like a certified credit verification organization, which is NCQA verification, is that necessary to do our job? No, it’s not. What it is, is a stamp of approval saying that an organization is abiding by their particular guidelines. But there’s a lot of different ways to to bake a cake, right, you don’t have to add the eggs, at the same time as the sugar in every recipe, sometimes accomplishing the goal, the end goal can mean assembling the different ingredients differently. Along the way for the best result, we have tooled a proprietary process for what we do in order to achieve the maximum layers of efficiency and drive the highest value while keeping costs pretty budget friendly. And

Steve Gallion 7:40
and basically allowing our customers to budget and knowing what their costs are going to be associated with driving the value they’re looking for were when you’re dealing with highly complex, highly variable tasks. Sometimes that means highly complex and variable pricing. And we that is not something that we look to drive to the market. And so abiding by the guidelines is one thing, we accomplish the goals for the end result. But our proprietary steps, we leverage our own technology and our software internally to help provide the service itself. Nice. It seems like like, what we’re talking about is really, really, really smart that that it’s I wrote down integrated, and you mentioned something about the code, being able to sort of everything fits together. So it’s not like you need to go get this and then you’re gonna have to go get this and then you got to go get this. And it also sounds like you’ve you’ve you’re able to educate the user, and then also give them the tool that they need to successfully do this, which seems like a lot of moving parts as well. Did you set out to do all of this? Or how did? How did you come to be where we are today? Yeah, it was like kind of a core internal concept. I think that smart people build kind of great product. And in order to have smart people around the table, you need to build product steering committees that don’t only consist of someone like myself, you know, I didn’t come up with product strategy in my basement by myself. It’s about talking to real users. And from top to bottom, the actual let’s say, frontline employee who’s not a provider, maybe the first person you would see in the doctor’s office, when you go to check in at reception. That person’s use usage and experience is going to differ from the providers usage and experience and we need to have sampling across the board. So we’ve really set up our product committees and our product team to do deep dives with real life situations, real life users, and that helps to drive how how we focus our product roadmap, how we focus our customer success experience, how we drive deeper layers of value and what and how we prioritize prioritize overall.

george grombacher 9:56
That’s fascinating. You hear from from

If you are somebody who is wanting to start a business, one of the core things are first things is you better talk to your customer and realize or figure out if there’s a need or if there’s going to be a fit. And it seems like that is a step, which is often skipped. But that is not a skip step that you have skipped here is that something you learn from experience, or you always took people’s advice?

Steve Gallion 10:20
It’s a little bit of both. I think that as a founder, as an entrepreneur, if you think you can silo yourself on an island to do your job, you’re probably missing a couple pieces.

You need to really find a core group of mentors around yourself

that are able to help assist you in thinking about the right direction. And you know, one of that to answer your question directly, like looking at market.

A lot of founders and entrepreneurs don’t think about market as the core driver. But I’ll tell you right now, if you go into a market that’s shrinking, or you’re going into a market where the total addressable market is something that is very small, like you might be building a business in a direction, that’s not worth building. And so those are some of the things that you really should be thinking about, I think back to, to undergrad, and one of my professors used to use an analogy about two CPAs. And they both come out and get their CPA licenses out of school. And one CPA says, I’m going to do taxes for everybody. And the other CPA says, You know what, I’m gonna go into a real niche area, I’m only going to do taxes for blind people that live on Third Street.

Now, guess what the CPA that that that did the taxes for the blind person on Third Street got every blind person on Third Street, but the total market wasn’t there to make him successful, the other person will be inherently more successful because it’s a broader market. So market considerations are not only part of the initial story. They’re part of the journey along the way. And that’s part of thinking about even raising money raising funding rounds. In healthcare, we have a compounded annual growth rate in healthcare itself over 15% annually. What does that mean, for us, it means really, our business could continue to double year after year for a very long time, and we wouldn’t capture our unfair share of the market. And that’s a really good place to be in when you’re thinking about overall high growth, especially in the technology sector. Yeah, that certainly makes sense. How is how is the competitive landscape for for what you’re doing?

Unknown Speaker 12:27
Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 12:30
So that we don’t have a lot of apples to apples competitors in the market. Usually,

Unknown Speaker 12:36
software’s are a little bit more verticalized and focused on a single product. So there’s a ton of different learning management systems in the world over 500 learning management systems, actually.

Unknown Speaker 12:48
And there are companies that focus just on credentialing or just on compliance tool sets. And we kind of looked at the market actually take that back, not kind of very intentionally looked at the market and said, What is wrong with this picture. And as decentralization of workforces became more apparent on the direction they were taking through the pandemic, it definitely definitely drove as an accelerant to our general thesis that we needed a single software that could accomplish multiple points of value and problem solve on multiple layers, as opposed to running, you know, five, six different platforms in parallel.

Unknown Speaker 13:28
And we see this in all types of different software’s. I mean, it’s one of the reasons you look at Google has Gmail, and Google Docs and all their different things, it’s nice to be able to work under one roof in that kind of native environment be able to bounce around between tool sets. And healthcare was lacking that on the competitive landscape. I know, our competitors or sea levels, or founders, whether they’re public or private, very, very well, it’s a small tight knit community. Matter of fact, we I don’t think anybody’s a enemy on the competitive landscape, there’s a ton of business out there, there are plenty of times where we run into, let’s say, a market,

Unknown Speaker 14:05
prospect that isn’t going to be best served by us where we will even cross refer business to one another. Those of us who have been successful in the marketplace, are they we get it. And we know that one of the best ways to build rapport is to help customers, even if it’s not through us. And

Unknown Speaker 14:25
it’s, it’s pretty interesting, but I think about the general landscape, there’s probably only five companies in the United States that really stand out as a true competitor at scale at size. And,

Unknown Speaker 14:39
you know, then they’re all reaching points if they’re not already there have pretty pretty high levels of success. Exciting. Nice. So who is your ideal client? User? Yeah, if you would have asked me this question two years ago, I would have told you it was SMB healthcare, which it

Unknown Speaker 15:00
As we define that very much by full time employee count, not by provider count.

Unknown Speaker 15:06
And in that bucket for us are going to be organizations with 600 or less employees. Now as product has scaled as we have verticalized, and focus more on, on making more robust sections of our system that are highly competitive against, let’s say, enterprise user needs, we’ve seen that our kind of core target market expand. So as it is today, we can serve full the full spectrum of health care whether it’s a single provider group all the way up through, you know, 25,000, employee hospital or health system.

Unknown Speaker 15:40
Depending on the product needs, they will differ throughout that spectrum. But the ability for us to deliver value is there. So pretty much anything in health care, we do have really, really interesting content around

Unknown Speaker 15:57
around post acute care environments, as well as you know, the acute care space both and we have been heavily expanding in both of those due to the content push, and that’s another unique identifier, I don’t know. And differentiator I don’t know, we’ll get into that. But in terms of questioning, but I’ll tell you, with our content, which drives high value to our customers, we are a little bit unique, because we own and create all of our own content. We have a network of

Unknown Speaker 16:27
authors with different credentials that assist us with creating healthcare content. But we don’t license content from third parties to deploy to our user base. And we operate a lot like Netflix in terms of when you are a customer, we’re not charging you on a pay per view basis. And we release content every month. And we prioritize that content by market need, whether it’s compliance related change, or some type of healthcare, regulatory change in the laws, or purely based off of let’s say, what’s happening in the world, we were probably one of the first if not the first, health care compliance companies to release a ama category one accredited COVID series for four hours, I mean, the very beginning of the pandemic when things were just starting. And so our eye is on not just mandatory changes, but also on the climate changes in the ecosystem of healthcare. Well, I think that that makes a ton of sense. And making the decision to how, how was that decision? Was it obvious Was it hard to say, You know what, we’re not going to outsource this, we’re going to bring people in house, we’re going to be able to create the content so that we’re in control of it so that we own it all these things? Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 17:42
In the learning management space, and in the compliance space, so content, when we’re thinking about educational content, or policies and procedures, like those are probably the two big focal points for content. And most companies will license packages of content from third party content houses that they specialize in the creation and licensing of the content itself. I just wasn’t satisfied with the quality. I wasn’t satisfied with the inability to customize the content in the way we wanted to deliver value. And I think that, you know, delivering general industry content, which a lot of a lot of companies do doesn’t resonate with our in customer market. And I’ll give you a good example, when we build content, we build content in a way that it’s applicable to multiple markets, and is able to be shifted based off of care setting based off of the end user experience and who are in the audiences. So

Unknown Speaker 18:44
a really easy example of this is if you enter a course, that is designed for multiple care settings, that course may ask you, you know, what is your role? And you’ll select from kind of a selection, and what is your care setting, let’s choose, let’s say we’re in an ambulatory surgical center, that content and will then dynamically shift to,

Unknown Speaker 19:06
to what that care setting is, and what that end user learning basis. So if you think about that, in an ambulatory surgical center, we’re going to be talking about how we, let’s say, protect the patient. Now, had I chosen a,

Unknown Speaker 19:23
let’s say, long term care facility, instead of Ambulatory Surgical Center, it’s going to be about how we help the resident, the terminology is different. And terminology has higher points of residence resident is able to resonate better with the end user in a way where

Unknown Speaker 19:40
it just makes more sense feels more customized. It truly is a wider glove experience for the end user, and we believe it drives a better educational experience. I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t do that. That everything you said makes perfect sense. So I like it. Well, Steve, the people are ready for that difference making tip. What do you have for them?

Unknown Speaker 20:00
Yeah, especially in today’s environment, we have a lot of people who have left the workforce a lot of concern around staffing, you hear it all the time in the news, lots of wages flying everywhere, up and down and a lot of uncertainty. If I have to tell people what it’s on where to really focus in the business, is probably where 80% of my time is spent. And that’s on talent.

Unknown Speaker 20:23
Really putting your, your lens and microscope over your talent layers, especially from the top down can be the life changing events and or the business changing event that you’re looking for, you know, best in class talent is, is tough to find. And when people ask me about the business, we are an employee first organization. So I look at the business employees first customer, second, shareholders, third, shareholders are looking for value. Without unhappy customers that received value from product and customer success, we cannot deliver that value to shareholders. And without great employees, we cannot deliver that value to our customers. Great companies are built on the backs of strong employees. And talent is the number one foundation for building that really strong employee base. So we want to know where to look. We want to know how to create long term long tail success. Look, look for talent. And I think a lot of people miss that. It’s a skill that is definitely learned over time. And if you nail it, you can be very, very successful. Well, I think that that is great stuff that definitely gets a Come on. Steve, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? How can they engage with you and med trainer? Yeah, so if you want to learn more about the company, and more about myself, visit med trainer.com. You can go to our About Us page and learn a little bit about me there. You can also ping me on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn name is my entire name altogether. So Steve Galleon Ste ve GA L L, i o n. I don’t have any other personal social media, but happy to always engage, especially with other founders, entrepreneurs, people have questions. Also students you know, I didn’t have a lot of guidance when I was a student on where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do, and would have loved to have had a mentor who had been through that cycle and so feel free to reach out and talk to anybody who who’s interested to have a conversation. Awesome. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show Steve your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas go to med trainer.com It’s me DTR ai n e r.com. Find Steve on LinkedIn under Steve Galleon Ste ve GA l l i o n, and get in touch. Thanks again, Steve. Awesome. Thanks a lot, George. And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. It’s we’re all in this together.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai