Successes

• First healthcare tech sales experience

• Experienced the type of demand you want to see as a startup - addressing burning needs that cost tons of money via a one-to-many sale to someone whose position is dedicated to this problem.

• Drove competition between multiple VC’s to improve valuation. I personally pitched all of the VC’s instead of the CEO.

• Created relationships with driving staff, implemented area leaders to delegate local problems and give ownership & improved pay to our most dependable drivers. This led to reduced stress all around and a team mentality when addressing new rides and cancellations on short notice - something that can prove difficult when trying to keep the driver pool lean.

Key Feature Implementations

• Participant Dashboards

  • I was tasked with collaborating with MCO, participants & guardians, and our development team to devise a participant-facing ride scheduling dashboard.

    • Problem: Participants and their guardians couldn’t book their own rides, nor did they know how much was left on their monthly balance. (Despite MCO’s being based on a the transportation consultant model, they were moving more towards self-direction - the landscape is dynamic and a bit confusing - I’d be happy to explain more).

    • Solution: A responsive, web-based (angular) dashboard that allowed for easy participant creation (with name, address, stakeholder contact info, monthly budget, and district rate logic). This allowed for easy hand-off to guardians and reduced overhead for MCO’s.

• Ride Board

  • Like many tech startups, things are mostly manual in the beginning. This was definitely the case with assigning drivers to rides. (We posted all rides on an area’s Google Calendar and then matched with drivers based on routes - which was also all manual.) Despite it’s clunkiness, it proved the model and allowed me to understand the problem intimately.

  • Solution: An internal ride board that indicated the nature of the ride (who it was, the route, and whether it was recurring or not). It sent automated notifications to the drivers in the area’s pool with availability during that time. This allowed us to reduce headaches and management costs as it pertained to our driver pool, and gave our drivers autonomy which they valued greatly.

Lessons Learned

• Reinforced importance of team dynamic

  • In order to successfully & sanely complete our contracts, we often had to bypass the words & ideas of the CEO. Adding someone who operated in a completely different manner than us was not good for morale and was a factor in us leaving in the company after our contracts despite full-time offers.

• Understanding decision making processes of buyer

  Knowing the objectives of the company, as well as the personal objectives of the POC are of utmost importance in your sales approach, pricing, & more.
  
  For instance, the MCO’s needed to try 2 new cost reduction pilots each year. They also had to call the lowest cost provider first for any ride. Sales were simple - we highlighted that this would be an easy cost reduction pilot because transportation consultants (MCO employees who booked rides on the behalf of participants) could handle more participants and our rides were cheaper than any of the competitors. This made the “yes” very fast and guaranteed calls as soon as we implemented the software.

• Contract negotiations

  • On the sales side, we got the yes very quickly, and first calls very quickly. At first, we saw that MCO’s were sometimes slow to expand to new counties, seemingly without reason. We started implementing milestone-based expansion clauses that obligated them to expand as soon as we hit mutually agreeable goals. This was a great “next steps” piece that kept revenue growing organically

  • On the employment side, we negotiated substantial equity for our 90 day employment, but we took a sputtering taxi company with no software nor developers into a growing, venture-backed startup - it was deserved. Unfortunately, the contract didn’t explicitly name the strike price of the options we were owed and there was no evaluation at the time of our contract completion (raise was on a SAFE). This is still being sorted out but I will make sure that there’s no expiration date on any options I’m granted, or a recent 409A :)