Go All In

The Inventive Journey
Episode #339
Go All In
w/ Ryan Bass

"Go all in, I mean it's something if you're going to get into, it's like Parks and Rec, like don't hold a half asset you got to get a whole asset. So go all in. You know you can't sit there to the side and say you know I'm going to work on this small business but I'm going do it under the confines of nine to five. Like if you jump in and you're not the founder or you're someone early that's joining in you need look at it as this is your baby too. And so just because you join in and there's no huge equity stake that's given to you out of the gate, it still behooves you to help out."

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What Is The Inventive Journey?

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

go all in i mean it's it's something if you're going to get into it it's like uh was it parks and rec like don't don't hold our half asset you got a whole asset so go all in um you know you can't sit there to the side and say you know i'm going to work on this small business but i'm gonna do it under the confines of nine to five like if you jump in and you're not the founder or you're someone early that's joining in like you gotta look at it as this is your baby too right and so just because you join in and there's no huge equity stake that's given to you out of the gate like it still behooves you to help out [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups into seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller ip law where he held startups and small businesses with their pads and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com got some time with us to chat and we're always here to help now today we've got another great uh guest on the podcast ryan bass and uh ryan grew up in a small town called pocahontas missouri and learned to work hard had a good work ethic as he grew up on a small farm a 16 acre or so farm helped out the families went to college on a into playing soccer and was a goalkeeper thought about going pro but decided that given that he was six foot what a parent which is apparently shorter for a goalie uh decided his uh prospects weren't as good so uh went off and decided to or to pursue the college degree and do that came out of school worked for cerner doing electronic records and worked for a couple of other hospitals before deciding to start his own business in the healthcare industry and he'll clue us in a little bit more about what that is so with that much his introduction welcome on the podcast ryan hey thanks thanks for having me absolutely excited to have you on so i just gave the muc or the much more condensed version of a longer journey so take us back a bit in time to how your journey got started in poker pocahontas idaho or missouri yeah yeah yeah i think saying it's a small town is kind of a an upgrade about what it really is so pocahontas is like the village so uh literally there's like 12 churches for the 100 people but one bar and one uh post office so yeah i grew up in the middle of the country we had chickens and all that fun stuff and uh um yeah so i played a lot of soccer that was kind of my outlet uh used that throughout high school and into college and i was two-time all-american in college a scholar all-american as you mentioned like the pay and stuff to do the prospect of becoming a professional if you're not going to the epl or like now there's at least livable wages at the mls to entry there um it's still pretty rough to be able to do something so i looked at it and said you know what would i want to put my body through or do i want to you know get a big boy job and so i kind of landed with getting a big boy job worked at cerner they throw you into random places so i got put into regulatory compliance got to read a whole bunch of fun law and one quick question then i know when you're interrupting the journey but so soccer was you know certainly it sounds like in high school and throughout a lot of college was a big focus or at least a big part of your life now what made you go from soccer very athletic outdoor you know out and doing sports and competing to electronic records for hospitals kind of how did you make that decision or kind of what guided you in that direction it's really like uh until now i didn't know what i wanted to do till i grew up you know what i mean like so it was cerner has a huge presence in kansas city and that's where i went to college so i had a lot of friends that worked there um they they spoke highly of like their experience and was like well i got to do something you know let's try this out and see how it goes so you know as i got into it like i said yeah i got thrown into regulatory and compliance and you know as much fun as it is to read legal regulations and from cms and everyone else um i kind of liked it uh you know a lot of people look at it and say like ah you know it's this monotonous really long like drawn out spell of what this legal requirement is then you have to interpret it one of those next steps but i kind of liked it because you know every year changes you're not selling and doing the same thing over and over again yeah you got to spend some time and educate yourself a little bit but at the end of the day you get to go and attack something new right so i did everything from alphabet soup of like iqr oqr ipf qr and you know i won't get into all the acronyms there um but all that was like free text based and like then you had to have somebody audit and like look and see if people actually like did what they said they were supposed to do and then i got to lead all the ecqms which was electronic clinical or quality measures and so with the electronic clinical quality measures i basically got to move everything from free text to discrete documentation like when you do an order in the chart when you do a drop down when you do a radio button that then completes kind of that compliance of what needs to be documented so i kind of led all of that from a project management standpoint from cerner and all their clients and really like enjoyed the additional responsibility the additional challenge like not wanting to be the bottleneck and so that's just kind of driven me in my career and then through the hospital moves with my wife and her doing her med school and then residency i've really gotten to see a lot of different areas within the health system and the hospital side of things which then kind of allowed me to take kind of my past experience of well it's an outside vendor here's a service here's something i'm doing and now i have experience with like you're on the hospital side you know how do we make whatever work how do we get to the point where um we're able to you know support this new documentation features or how do we get to you know what do we have to do so it kind of gives me a unique experience from being able to see the viewpoint from the vendor from the health system side um the regulatory background and being able to help interpret and say like well here's legally what you have to do and now that you have this legal requirement here are all the benefits that you can streamline that you know today are either done manually or if at all right and then what's the impact to your your patients your health system your bottom line no and i think that makes that makes perfect sense so now as you get in you know out of a few different motivations and you got into it now you've worked with cerner for about how long um for that like all in all it's probably two to three years um i don't have my linkedin profile up in front of me but you know i did everything from like i started with them when i was in college doing their non-profit so i worked at their first hand foundation which basically like they give money to patients that are children that have displacement or other things that like you know the kids family couldn't afford so they pay for her surgeries and everything to go along with it so i started there and then moved into the consulting wing and then led that ecq ems and then um when my now wife matched to her clinical rotations i just told sir like hey i'm moving and they're like oh well uh you have to get approved and i was like well i'm moving in a month so let me know if i need to find a new job which led to them you know approving me to go remote but then they wanted me to travel 100 of the time and i was just like i just moved to southwest florida i'm not going to now spend my entire time flying to places that aren't southwest florida so got a job at the health system she was was working at for clinical rotations and learned the ambulatory side of the world where acute was basically where i was prior no it makes sense and so that you answer one of the questions i had which is what made you so you started out in cerner and then you ended up going to a couple different hospital systems it sounds like as your wife was going through the various rotations and earning those uh degrees and whatnot and getting or finishing up the education that it made sense that you would rotate through the different hospital systems and go on that aspect so now as you're going through that and you're now in florida and you moved around you worked with a couple different hospital systems and as well as with cerner what made you kind of switch gears or start to explore the entrepreneurial path or doing kind of your own thing was it out of a matter of hey we're making another move and i can't find a job this time or was it more of hey i have a desire and i always wanted to do it or now is the right time or you know kind of what was that genesis 4 looking to start to do your own business and was it one that started on the side while you were still working or did you take the plunge and i know there's like 20 questions in there but it's kind of curious what uh what motivated the the shifting of gears yeah i mean it kind of goes to the old adage that like everyone says right um you know there's two ways you become an entrepreneur it's either that like something directly impacts you or happens to you or someone close to you and you take it up as kind of your your mantle of this is what i'm going to do or in kind of my case it's like i just got tired of working for people that were incompetent if i'm being completely frank um you know i was a regulatory expert but you know the quality director in the last hospital i was at didn't know how to tie his shoes if it meant reading a regulatory compliance document so i saved them four and a half million dollars by making them compliant within a very short window because they neglected to look at how they were going to submit what they were going to do um on the other side of things like my director had no idea about anything regulatory so it was just kind of like me out on my own island like making sure that the hospital was compliant and everyone above me you know is basically getting to set on my shoulders right and look good and so i got to the point of like you know why am i doing someone else's mission or someone else's you know goals i need to go and figure out what i want to do and so i started the side hustle you know i highly recommend even like you know people that will start working for my company like if you have a passion if you were able to cultivate skills like obviously want to grow you and bring you in and have you stay here but like if you have a passion you want to work on something on the side that doesn't you know directly take away from what we're doing then you know more power to you because like i feel like in the corporate world today it's very stifling right it's it's this is your nine to five this is your window this is what you do and so when i was i was working there i just got to the point of like you know i need to find my own path i need to find my own my own creed and like go after it and when i was doing all the the compliance stuff i found that there was this new documentation point with udi and unique device identifiers there was nothing on the market that could do kind of the end-to-end transcription and notifications that i was looking for um because as i went around the hospital with that new documentation point i was like how do we do this today like we have a new documentation point what do we do today and i got everything from well we do it in pre-op we do it in post-op we do the documentation in op notes or worst it was like we have a notebook and we write stent information in the notebook it was like well what if somebody has left-handed handwriting and they smudge the ink and you can't tell if it's a six or an eight or someone spills coffee on it like what do we do then they're like i don't know and so it's like so we can have a recall we have an important notice on a device that a patient is relying on and could potentially die from if they don't get that notification and our solution is a piece of paper with a pen and then when somebody has an issue with it they're then coming back and going through a paper book and then trying to see if they can read the transcription and then go find the patient and it's like that seems like it's a lot of time that's being wasted for like a very important notice in which like patients don't get notified and ultimately end up with the brunt of that with you know loss of life or glossary quality of life so gains are kind of yeah his answer kind of like a roundabout of what what you asked it was like i wanted to go my own path i started with a side hustle um i've got to the point where it was like all right i need to focus on this fully and you know that's been the journey of the last year and a half or so of like let's build it get the mvp get all the regulatory builds in what are the other solutions sorry to compile that like team together and you know now we're at the point of starting to commercially launch and become viable oh it definitely makes sense as you know that's a lot of times you know i think that there's a lot of entrepreneurs to get to the point to say hey i think i can do this better i can do it cheaper faster quicker more efficiently less errors and all the or any or all the above and you say you know i can't really where i'm at is not it doesn't uh provide for that or allow for that and there are a myriad of reasons they may not want to invest in it they may not see it they may have other priorities they may not have the budget any number of things but you're saying at some point if this is getting done i've got to do it in a different context and so you decide to go out on your own now one of the things you also sometimes see with special entrepreneurs is then when you get out and actually say you know i can do this better i can do they're cheaper faster you know all those reasons why you go out on your own you get into and you say this is a lot harder than i thought in other words hey how do i or do all the employees how do i get this funded how do i manage payroll how do i you know go out and find people that are willing to buy new marketing and sales and all those things that you don't really think about when you're working for someone else and you're using the system but now you're having to build it and you're having to sell it so what was your experience is it one where it was a smooth and easy transition was it one where it was a little more bumpy and had to figure a lot more things out or how did it go as you decided to start it out as a side hustle well so as a side hustle like it was it was okay like finding other people similar minded it was all right like with existing kind of side hustles so i originally started like consulting for a group and trying to figure out how to make what they had better um but really the the i'll say the the personalities of like what i wanted to do what they wanted to do were different so i went and just said okay i'm just going to go and do what i see as my vision on my own um in that i tried to i'll say i tried to hedge it right so i was like i'm a 20-something entrepreneur what health system is going to buy from a 20-something who's never done sales before i don't know kind of what i'm doing in that arena so i went out and i found someone to like bring in um i brought them in and let's just say it didn't really work out and we'll just kind of leave it at that just there were a lot of i'll say mistakes and i i like to make the reference that like um if you run with scissors and you don't fall on it one time and it works out for you like that's great but you probably shouldn't just be running around the scissors all the time saying like yeah it'll work at all occasions right so it's like essentially the biggest kind of thing that i learned and like how i started out what i focused on and how i kind of made that entrepreneur journey was like you really just got to trust yourself right you can't go out and look at it and say use that imposter syndrome of like hey i don't know if i'm good enough hey why is somebody gonna buy for me because the second you start asking questions like that like no one's gonna buy from you right you have to have that confidence you gotta have that mindset of like i'm doing this this is what i'm going to accomplish here's how i'm going to accomplish it and i will find those those steps along the way and i will make it happen and it's not going to be easy in every step of the regard so like you might run into something where you raise a little bit of money and then the money starts to run out and then you make a decision of okay do i suffer a little bit and protect my investors or do i pack it in and you know there were so many times along the early stage of the journey that like i wasn't pulling a paycheck it was very very tight at home like i voiced a resident like i said we have two kids so it's very very kind of touch and go financially but like i owed it to those people who invested from the get-go that like i was going to be a fiduciary in their investment and not just say hey i tried i you know we took your money and nothing happened so thanks a lot goodbye so it was you know like brent and barrett you go through you suffer you get what you need for the next steps you continue to grow it and work with it you know scrap everything together that you can and then you know you get that next investment wing and then you feel good and now it's how do i get to the next one right so you know when we're pushing through these next phases and stuff it's like the grit and determination's there which is also good for investors to see right like hey i've suffered if i suffer for these guys for peanuts of what you know comparatively of what they put into what we want to raise the next round just imagine what i'm going to do for you right oh i think that there's a lot of good points in there and definitely sounds like you know it's one of those where a lot of people have that journey and you do kind of get to the hey as we're getting this up and going you know i can either try and you know get out of what i can and make the money i can and i'll get paid myself an absorbent in salary no matter the cost type of a thing and if it goes under so be it i'll make some good money on the way or you can say hey i'm going to sacrifice or we're going to figure this out or i may take a reduced salary or you know for a period of time or any of those numbers and it is one where it you know it's a proving point both to yourself you're willing to sacrifice and also to those that are looking to invest in you and be along the journey so i think there's a lot of great great points in there now as you kind of you know bring that up to a bit or i think where you guys are at today or you know as you continue forward kind of where do you see the next six to 12 months going for you guys kind of what's the the road map or the plan yeah so i mean we got another trash of cash here at the end of last year so with that you know we brought in our first employee to focus on the commercialization uh we're in advanced conversations with a number of hospitals as well as device manufacturers that we're communicating with as well so we're in those initial conversations or somewhere closer to the end we just got to get it in and get it you know running in some of those first customer sites and then we're kind of ready to go off to the races that next six to 12 month runway is really like i said focus on the commercialization getting good insights getting those value statements showing the roi showing the value that we bring that we know that we have encompassed within our platform but it's just getting to that bridge to the next step right and i think that like that's a big instance of like startups right so everything is kind of uh piecemeal and it's what cash do i need at the minimum to get from a to b and then once you get there you gotta at the same time you're doing a to b you gotta start raising money for how do i get to b to c and then as you start doing b to c you're already raising money from c to d so you're constantly just like saying here's what i'm going to accomplish here's the steps that we're going to take to get there and you know at the same time thinking about well once i get there what's my next step and how much money do i need and how do i go raise that money and so it's been a lot smaller steps like as you get closer to the inception of the idea but now we're moving towards you know that professional seed round with professional vcs and out of kind of the friends family kind of investment arena and then how do we move that to a seed round and then what are those target customers what are those target markets in which we get a penetration amount and then raise the next amount of money because you know the name of the game is don't run out of money but at the same time you don't want to give away your company for peanuts right so it's kind of that adage of don't sell the farm for the for the radishes like you know you'll get more radishes so it's like you'll be fine just uh don't give it up for for you know a small amount when you can um continue to work on it and build it know that that payout is you know down the road as far as like growing it to what you want it to be and i'll key in real quick like so payout like that terminology i think that's also an important distinction to make for these early entrepreneurs and what you're doing because there's other payouts outside of just financial means everybody wants to hear that word and think like oh well i'm gonna i'm gonna sell it for 100 million dollars i want to keep 50 of it so i can put 50 million in the bank um but like if you're really solving a problem and you're not creating a problem to solve like some of that payout is like actually seeing your product do what it's supposed to do and actually impact people that you've targeted like you know the problem what's the issue how do we fix it so now that i fixed it like that's that's the reason that you started your company right uh i mean i guess not everybody some people are saying i want to make a bot but like for those that are looking at here's the thing that i'm solving seeing it in action and seeing it actually make the impact to those people that you started it for like that's that's part of that like great payment that you get back that's not financial no and i think there's a lot of uh great takeaways and i think you're absolutely right there's a lot of different motivations and sometimes you may even take your reduced pay but you love what you're doing or it's enjoyable and so there's a lot of different ways and motivations as to why you're doing a you're doing your own business so well as we've kind of reached now a bit at the end of your journey and even looking a bit to where you guys are headed great time to always transition the end of the journey to the two questions always ask about your journey so the first question i always ask is along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it um i mean i'd go back and reference the kind of uh imposter syndrome so the worst business decision i made was you know hey i can't do this on my own i need to have somebody who's been there done that like on their resume let me go find them and then you know they'll help me learn and grow along the way whereas like if they're not passionate about it and they're not the ones who are driven to like actually make a change they might be there as like a figurehead but they're not going to actually help you in any sense along the way they may even drive you towards bad decisions that you know they're not they're looking for the financial outcome right they're not looking for the other impacts of hey you know i'm impacting these patients or hey i'm impacting these direct people and solving the problem so like worst business decision was not trusting myself and saying like you know i'm going to do this come hell or high water and so now that i kind of learned that um i've always made myself 100 available to anybody starting out their entrepreneurial journey of like you know i'm not going to charge you a consultant fee and like pay me 200 an hour to sit here and talk through like you know what you should do or that i've had multiple meetings with people already about like let me just you know give you an overview of like my experience the mistakes that i made and then you could take those into account of like is that a mistake that you potentially could avoid or not because i thought it was a golden uh silver bullet right i'm gonna bring on this person bring them bring them a lot of equity in we're gonna go hand in hand and every misstep along the way that like i could make they're gonna say no don't do it this way this is what you need to do and so every business is different every year every decade every like upgrade or uh um regulatory requirement that gets introduced then adds more folds so even if someone was successful 20 years ago it has no bearing on are they going to be successful to tomorrow absolutely so yeah i certainly agree with or agree with that and i think circling back is you know the imposter syndrome is one where it can be difficult and i think people even that you look and think have a successful business is oftentimes on the inside they're still wondering when the business is going to go under when it's going to fail and when they're going to be proven everybody else is going to be all the naysayers going to be proven right so i think that's always something that people are having to juggle and deal with second question i always ask is talking to somebody that's just getting into a startup or small business would be the one piece of advice you'd give them go all in i mean it's it's something if you're going to get into it it's like uh uh was it parks and rec like don't don't hold our half asset you got a whole asset so go all in um you know you can't sit there to the side and say you know i'm gonna work on this small business but i'm gonna do it under the confines of nine to five like if you jump in and you're not the founder or you're someone early that's joining in like you gotta look at it as this is your baby too right and so just because you join in and there's no huge equity stake that's uh given to you out of the gate like it still behooves you to help out and like you know those equity stakes can always be improved right so show your work don't necessarily need it and like in a contract when you start but like also when you when you start those things find people who are like uh where you know they're honorable and like what they say is what they mean um a lot of people will kind of like you know say one thing out of one side of their face and the others uh other side do something else like i worked with with one startup where uh they've given me a contract of here's what we're gonna pay you here's the equity incentive and then um when it kind of got brought to light towards the end of my engagement with them they were like oh i know you signed it you've been working on this for like a year or whatever but we never counter signed it so like it doesn't happen it's void you know it's not we don't owe you anything and it's like well that's not how the wall works we worked under this like agreement that we both had an understanding that you wrote it you gave it to me i signed it i gave it back just because you didn't send it back to me you still worked under the agreement uh to this point so you can't no i think there's definitely a lot of the truth that i you know i think that probably going all the way back is to do the all-in and i think that there's you have to be committed to the business if you're going to go in because it is not going to be easy and there's going to be bumps there's going to be a lot of fun times but there also is going to be a lot of times where you're going to have to have the grit to make it through so i think that's a great takeaway well as we wrap up the the episode if people want to reach out to they want to be a customer they want to be a client they want to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact you or find out more um so you can reach me on linkedin that's ryan bass you can also send me an email at rbass at carrier.com c-a-r-e-i-e-r um very open my number will be on the website when we release the new website that comes out uh hopefully in the next week or so so feel free to reach out you can uh you know reference the podcast and i'm more than happy to set aside time meet talk you know talk about any of the items above awesome well i definitely encourage people to reach out connect up find out more and support uh a great uh business and uh and a great product so with that as we wrap up thank you again ryan for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you that are listeners if you are um have your own journey to tell you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you you can just go to inventiveguest.com apply to be on the show a couple more things to listeners make sure to click subscribe share leave us a review because we want to make sure that everyone finds out about all these awesome episodes and journeys last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your startup or your small business just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat they're always here to help thank you again ryan for coming on the podcast and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last awesome thanks devin

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