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Welcome to the Confidence Curve with Ashley and Rick Bowers, where personal and professional journeys define the art of scaling with confidence.
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Whether you're a business leader navigating change or someone seeking personal growth, this podcast offers insights and actionable advice to help you thrive.
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Now let's dive into today's conversation with our incredible guest.
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Welcome to the Confidence Curve podcast with Apex GTS Advisors.
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My name is Ashley Bowers and my husband, business partner Rick Bowers, here to host today.
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We want to welcome our guest Stefan.
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He's a serial entrepreneur with a couple of different businesses and we're super excited to have him here with us today.
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And if you'd like to kick it off, tell us a little bit about you and both businesses.
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Sure, sure.
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So thanks for having me.
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Good to be here.
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So yeah, you know, I guess background about myself.
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I'm from Arizona.
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We're here in the Valley, right.
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I grew up here Honestly never really saw myself being a business owner and things like that.
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Honestly never really saw myself being a business owner and things like that.
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You know, went to high school Red Mountain, asu, nau lived in the Valley, ended up getting a job in medical, you know, non-clinical, more of like admin assistant and then just kind of like worked my way up from there, worked for different clinics, different roles.
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Ended up merging with a bigger company here in the Valley and kind of ran their specialty divisions Right.
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Ended up merging with a bigger company here in the Valley and kind of ran their specialty divisions right.
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So from there what happened is a lot of my day-to-day stuff was, like I said, operational things right, making sure we were functioning well, being Switzerland between corporate and the physicians and the clinic and things like that.
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And what ended up happening is we wanted to expand, right.
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So it was kind of my portion to go out, find new practices, bring on more doctors, things like this.
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In a lot of those conversations, a lot of private practices in the space, knew where I worked and also kind of felt my experience and said, hey, could you actually just we don't want to sell, we kind of want just advice, right?
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So about seven years ago started doing independent consulting for medical clinics anything from primary care, specialty, chiro, pt, you name it and then just kind of grew over time what the big demand came to be was recruiting, right.
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So, hey, do you know a nurse, do you know a surgeon, this or that?
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And I did, and I think at the time I would just connect them through the retainer I had.
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And it was just, you know, good to be good to my clients, right?
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A colleague of mine said hey, do you know how much you know XYZ company paid to bring on their new neurosurgeon, he told me.
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And he was like, oh my gosh, I'm like I'm stepping over a lot of money.
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So naturally progressed to doing a lot of recruiting rather than just project based consulting.
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And now to this day we have HealthOp, we have a few different pillars.
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Like I said, still project-based consulting Recruitment's a huge aspect of what we do now, mostly Arizona.
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We have a few national partners and things like this and we have some cool stuff in the future works and really our mission at the company is to give resources.
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You know that we wish we had Most.
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All people here have worked in health care, worked in clinics non-clinical and clinical Kind of felt like a lot of people weren't up to just help one another in the space.
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Everybody thinks they have secrets, but everybody's doing the same thing.
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They just don't talk about it.
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So that's always our mission there.
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What happened to my second venture and journey was basically a lot of our health care clinics were offshoring a lot of work and weren't satisfied.
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I knew a couple of people that had their own virtual assistant kind of companies did well and said, hey, you know, talk me out of this, I'm thinking about doing it.
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And I was like listen, we're already in recruiting.
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Like how hard could it be to find people from around the world?
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Turns out it's a totally different animal, but we figured it out and so a lot of our clinics utilized us.
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And then they said, hey, I got a realtor, I got a CPA, I got an attorney, I think they could use somebody.
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And the messaging got kind of mixed right, like why is HealthOp giving an attorney, a virtual assistant?
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So started a new pillar called Virtue Staff and yeah, that has a unique mission as well.
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You know that we can get into as well.
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But I guess that's as abbreviated as I could do, if that makes sense, great.
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Okay, so you basically are providing resources, consulting services, different opportunities and things to the medical professionals, and sometimes it was things that didn't exist at the time, so you had to create some of this.
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And so what gaps or challenges did you identify in the medical community that led to the creation of really HealthOp?
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So it was.
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It was a mix of a couple of different things, right?
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It's like, you know, there's like this stigma that goes around in the consulting thing, Like, and you know a lot of people say hey, like a lot of um practices that start up don't know business, they know medicine and like, to be fair, like I don't know how to do heart surgery.
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You know what I mean, and I can't even say I started my business perfect right off the bat, Right?
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So I think what happened a lot was there was just gaps.
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You know, starting a company, you know, depending on how you start, terms of funding, timelines, things like this just need to get going, you know, and, with that being said, not everybody does everything right.
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Most people don't and so we tried to fill in gaps of what they needed, without, I guess, hiring someone that just wanted to learn it on the fly or things like that.
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And, conversely, with recruiting, you know like I've had to work with recruiters in my corporate life and it was a nightmare.
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I mean, like people changing resumes, selling them on a job where it's not actually that poor candidates, extremely expensive.
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It was just like a nightmare, you know.
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And so, really, like I said, I looked at stuff and I said how do I wish I had it.
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What resources do I wish I had Even new grad physicians coming out like we try to help them with, like even some contract review, right, Knowing what you can and can't, redline Things like this, that's just again it felt like no one was helping and we just said, hey, what are the things we can help with that we're qualified to help with and that's how we built it out, so that kind of makes sense.
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Absolutely.
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Looking at, you know today's economic environment and all the different changes and things that are happening.
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You know, a lot of times business owners and leaders like okay, if unemployment rates are going up, then you know, all of a sudden we should have more candidates.
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Or if we're going to have struggles in the economy, people are going to become available and, as we know, when we're looking for candidates and trying to find the right people, you know, yes, there are people available, but it's not always that perfect candidate that becomes available.
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It's not necessarily an employer's market or an employee's market.
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What advice are you giving right now, both to your candidates as well as to the companies that you're serving?
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Yeah, it's such a great question, right, and like I think that sometimes we joke that if companies invested into maybe some of these other you know cultures or company branding or things like this, that they might need to use us even a little bit less, you know.
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But you know the job market.
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Everybody says there's a shortage and there is.
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It's not as much as people say.
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And, like you, know the job market everybody says there's a shortage and there is, it's not as much as people say.
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And, like you said, it's more so finding the right person.
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I will say that the reason people end up using recruiting and a lot of our clients actually have talent acquisition built in, so it's not just people without a recruiter in house the thing with us is that year round, we're looking for people that want a better opportunity, right?
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So, like I used to tell people, the people you want aren't applying.
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Like, let's be honest, you know what I mean.
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And that's where, like headhunting, recruiting, things like this comes in.
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Conversely, maybe there's some roles you get flooded with candidates and you know, for instance, in the medical community, like medical assistants, like MAs, even with us, through application booking, the appointment reminders leading up to the interview, everything like that 80% will no-show.
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And so now you're paying an office manager, administrator, hr a lot of money to wait around for no-shows and hopefully they're good about using their downtime, but who knows, right?
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So different roles have different problems, but what I always tell people is that you don't need us unless you need us.
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So if you've got a good thing going, you're getting the talent you want, the volume you want, you don't really need us.
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But if it comes to a point where you say, hey, like and you know this better than anything, I need high-level talent to put my company at the next level, that's where we come in.
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Conversely, people say I'm just not getting anybody at all.
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That's where we come in, because you've got to realize that year-round we're just having conversations, people applying, people referring over people we meet with networking.
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So when we meet so many people and build those relationships and someone needs someone.
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You know, listen, we do spend a lot of money on ads and things like that every month to get candidates.
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But I mean, you got to do both.
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And for a company.
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It's really expensive to do that.
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You know it's very expensive and so not all of them do it right, or it doesn't even make sense for them to do it a certain size, you know.
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But I feel like the strategies change.
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You know, what you should put in it.
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You know, in one month, six months later, even on LinkedIn and some of the different you know portals, the way in which candidates are.
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You know being attracted to the different ads can change over time as well, and what they're looking for and and things like that.
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What are you finding kind of at the top, maybe like three things that candidates are really considering the most important when they're making a decision about where to go?
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I mean, obviously, financial compensation.
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There's a certain need that everybody has and it needs to meet that need, and you know inflation and things like that, that need is increasing.
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But beyond that base compensation, you know what are people really looking for today?
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It's a great question, and the way that we try to find that out is anyone that's a recruiter or consultant with my team that's talking to candidates gets training on how to do these interviews, because our interviews are non-traditional.
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We start right off the bat saying, hey, my whole goal today is to learn more about you and what you're looking for.
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I'll talk about the position in an open format.
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I'm not going to sell you on the position.
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I'm going to be as transparent as I can, because it doesn't do you any good to get somewhere you don't want to be.
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It doesn't give the employer any benefit of getting someone there that doesn't want to be there, right, and, like you said, sure, everybody wants to make more money, right, but, um, and it'll, it'll vary by the role, once again, um.
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So let's talk physicians, for instance, right?
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Um, depending on the specialty and the type of physician, um, it's going to depend a lot more than compensation.
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One thing you'll find a lot right now is patient load, um, so, and a lot of people in the healthcare field are probably like rolling their eyes or laughing or things like that.
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So, um, because, listen, we, we do have employers, and this is kind of getting into the other side of healthcare, which is a whole other conversation.
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But, um, we clinics that see, I think, what a lot of people consider higher volume, especially if they're a new grad.
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Right, it's going to be hard for me to see 20, 30 patients a day, and it depends on the model of the clinic, of what that looks like.
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Granted, some clinics give resources like scribes and things like this, others don't.
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You talk about the acuity.
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So how sick are these patients?
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You know, say, in primary care.
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Well, you know, what kind of demographic am I seeing?
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Is this a rural healthcare clinic?
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Are these a lot of non-compliant patients?
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And so a lot of times they'll say, hey, what's the patient volume and what support do I get?
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You know, that's one of the things A lot of people do want now an administrative role, which signifies to me some burnout in healthcare, right.
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So we have a lot of people do want now an administrative role, which signifies to me some burnout in health care, right?
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So we have a lot of physicians saying, hey, is there an admin component?
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More and more people want a medical director role, yeah, which is interesting for sure.
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And again, physician-employee burnout's a whole other topic, but it's real in healthcare, you know, and so I think that on the physician side, that's definitely it.
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You're seeing a lot of 410 schedules.
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You're actually seeing some people.
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I actually met with a CEO of a local hospice company.
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Everyone at their company works 32 hours a week but gets paid 40 hours a week.
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So it's interesting stuff like that that you have to compete with, you know, and so it's.
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It really varies by person.
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That's what we try to understand, because we get both sides of it Like I've worked the non clinical side.
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We have people on our team that are clinical and, just like anything, we try to meet in the middle and understand what works best for both people.
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So it kind of varies in the middle and understand what works best for both people.
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So it kind of varies.
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With all of that that you just said, how do you kind of get a feel for what the culture of the organization or the physician's office?
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How do you get a feel for that when you're interviewing the potential prospects to go in there and figure out what that match is?
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How does the culture piece come to play?
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Yeah, that's such a good question.
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So over time a lot of our business we get is actually referral right, it's word of mouth, it's hey, I know someone that could use your help.
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And if we're talking recruitment side especially, you know a lot of these clinics like healthcare is a big, small world.
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Everybody knows everybody.
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There's no doubt reputation gets around, but we actually take our time to visit a lot of these clinics.
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If we're able to, we'll spend a day inside the clinic to see what it's like.
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To be honest, we've also turned down clients for just certain reasons that we don't think it's a good fit.
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We don't like to feed people to the wolves, if you will.
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And so for us, we try to protect ourself as a company by and we have the luxury to to be a little bit more picky with our clients, right, we kind of analyze turnover rates within the people we send over.
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We openly ask them what's your turnover look like right now?
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Why do people want to work here?
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So one way we kind of protect our candidates is being a little bit more selective with our client, with our client, and you know we tell a lot of our candidates to hey, we can only vouch so much for the culture because we're not embedded in the clinic right At the end of the day, like, whoever it is.
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Like you need to go visit that clinic, right, so say you're an NP, pa, md, do whoever.
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Don't take our word for it.
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Like, go meet, don't just take a tour of the facility, say where am I going to be working?
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Who am I going to be working with?
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Can I go to that atmosphere?
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Right, don't bring me to the corporate office where everything's good to go.
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If I'm going to be in Timbuktu and there's no support, like can I go see it first, you know?
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So we really always advise that and we're really clear on that.
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Like, hey, like definitely go visit.
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This is what we can tell you, but you need to make the decision yourself.
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Um cause, once again, we do not sell people on positions, yeah, so shifting gears a little bit back to health op.
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How, how have you built or enhanced the culture within your own organization?
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Listen, we're, we're a small company, so like we're very selective with who we hire.
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We are so selective, you know, and um, and it feels like it's a hot market right now, but we get consultants and recruiters coming to us, like very often, to be honest, and it's cool because it kind of like feeds the beast, like when we're interviewing all day long, my recruiters know, hey, this is, this is someone you want to talk to, and I'll make time out of my own schedule to meet with them, right, and so I think we just listen.
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You know, with time, everything changes and goals change and things like this.
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My plan has never been for HealthOp to be a publicly traded billion dollar company.
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Right, we're already further than I ever saw myself being.
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In general, I'm very thankful every day for you know what we've built as a team, who my team is, and so, with that being said, we do have the luxury with scaling as needed, as I will say, you know, and we do want to grow, we do want to get bigger, but I'm very thankful that, through our network and through what we do, we are pretty naturally able to just bring on people that resonate with our culture, and we're pretty specific and analytical with what this role entails, what the future of that role is.
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I think there's certain roles where people want a nine to five, and I'm okay with that.
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I think a lot of like business owners, startups especially want everyone to grind.
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I want them to grind 24 seven all the time being this with me.
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There's roles that need them.
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There's roles that don't all the time be in this with me.
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There's roles that need them.
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There's roles that don't, and you'll actually do yourself a favor if you find the roles that don't and find someone that values that work-life balance and so all of these things we try to take into consideration, right, so it's careful, we're very careful with who we bring on for it, and that's the easiest way to do it.
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Hardest thing to change is a culture, and that's why you know there are certain bounds.
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We don't step over with clients in terms of trying to change a culture.
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So obviously you have, you know, health ops and virtue staff.
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Are there other verticals in the future for you, Because you know, obviously being able to be this successful in the health care arena it's a very difficult arena, a very technical arena.
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Are there other verticals in the future and, if so, can you share what people might be looking for from you in the future?
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Yeah, there's some I can share and some that we're working on.
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So I do think that the trendiest thing, not just in healthcare, is AI, and a lot of healthcare clinics are looking into AI, how to do it HIPAA compliance, right wrongs, good solutions and not.
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We're starting to build out a little bit of a space for it in not necessarily just recruitment.
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We use AI in our recruiting efforts, but I think a lot of healthcare clinics can improve in a lot of ways by using AI appropriately, and so we kind of have that focus for the future.
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I think there's going to be a new position called chief AI officer.
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Everyone has a CTO and things like this.
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I think chief AI officer is going to be a thing.
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So, if we can kind of be ahead of the curve a little bit, I'd love to do that.
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And yes, there are a couple other pillars that we'd like to get into that we're working on for next year that, if they come to light, we'll kind of talk about.
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But that's one example.
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that's a hot topic, but I think it's really cool and I'm not the perfect person for that.
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We're actually trying to find more people that know more about AI and healthcare.
00:17:27.165 --> 00:17:34.365
We've talked to a lot of device and product companies out there, but I'd love to move into that space.
00:17:35.655 --> 00:17:36.701
It's an interesting space.
00:17:36.701 --> 00:17:42.604
It's something that I use almost every day in business and I know you use it quite a bit as well.
00:17:42.604 --> 00:17:56.101
But I find myself having a conversation with ChatGPT, and today I was working on a project and I was like, oh, I don't think he liked my response to that, because I felt like the response that I got back from ChatGPT was a little bit negative.
00:17:56.101 --> 00:18:06.489
This is interesting how it's kind of growing and and I feel like they learn your, your trends and the different things that you do.
00:18:06.489 --> 00:18:10.259
So it's it's something that you have to embrace it, because you're going to get less left behind if you don't.
00:18:10.259 --> 00:18:12.202
So it's just it's a powerful tool.
00:18:12.323 --> 00:18:28.867
It's a little bit scary, but you just got to go for it sometimes yeah, chris johnson, the ceo of lane tara lever, and now he has a company called tomorrow today, which is an ai consulting company, and, um, he was teaching a peer advisory group that I'm a part of and he was like good morning, thank you.
00:18:28.867 --> 00:18:31.942
And all of a sudden I'm like do you need to be that polite?
00:18:31.942 --> 00:18:32.806
Like what are you doing?
00:18:32.806 --> 00:18:33.997
Is this a part of your strategy?
00:18:34.417 --> 00:18:37.564
he goes at some point I feel like it's going to come back and it's going to be a benefit.
00:18:37.564 --> 00:19:06.563
So yes, it is a part of my strategy and so it was kind of funny of just having that whole conversation as you look on the virtue staffing side and kind of what have been some of the big wins that maybe you starting out in that space thought would be a bigger obstacle for you than maybe what they were or kind of that value, because you hear about virtual assistants and that kind of service so much and people sometimes are afraid because of you know the training or the turnover or how do we know that we fit?
00:19:06.563 --> 00:19:11.925
So what is it that's unique about the service offering that you have and how you work with your clients in that space?
00:19:12.634 --> 00:19:13.776
Yeah, yeah, so great question.
00:19:13.776 --> 00:19:15.237
So I think a few things.
00:19:15.237 --> 00:19:25.222
There is like one, something that we didn't expect coming from the recruitment space was just the sheer volume, right, I mean it's, it's incredible.
00:19:25.222 --> 00:19:29.164
I mean like we actually pumped the brakes so we could do more.
00:19:29.164 --> 00:20:01.980
But we have, and recruiting with, you know, some inbound, granted, but a lot of headhunting, recruiting to where it's like we are just bombarded by the amount of applications, and so, you know, something Rick and I were actually talking about was like, hey, like some of this testing, like you know, I go back to the days where you had to like walk in and there was like a kiosk to apply at the store, right, you know, and you had to take a test and assessment.
00:20:02.000 --> 00:20:03.125
but you did it because you wanted the job.
00:20:03.125 --> 00:20:04.429
You know obviously the job market's not like that now.
00:20:04.429 --> 00:20:13.788
But man, we've had to build in so many assessments and then refine those assessments and then even after that say, okay, like out of the people that pass, how do we refine that?
00:20:13.788 --> 00:20:22.249
So, like, even using a brand new ATS, the ATS we used could not handle some of the automations and testing features we needed.
00:20:22.249 --> 00:20:25.719
So now you can only imagine anyone that's built out an ATS.
00:20:25.719 --> 00:20:33.931
It's not as bad as maybe Salesforce or things like that, but I mean it's a build out you know, and so we had to then find a whole new ATS system.
00:20:34.512 --> 00:20:37.883
we had to go through the testing progress process what integrates?
00:20:37.883 --> 00:20:43.066
And, like I said, thank God I have good business partners, because there's no way I could have done it.
00:20:43.066 --> 00:20:44.417
It's just too much you know.
00:20:45.480 --> 00:20:50.742
So, anyway, going back, basically we had an influx of people and it's always been important to us to deliver a valuable service.
00:20:50.742 --> 00:20:58.884
And it's funny, because recruiting and virtual assistants I think both get a bad reputation for a good reason.
00:20:58.884 --> 00:21:07.107
To be honest, you know what I mean, but that's kind of always been my passion thing is like it's like maybe something people say but don't mean.
00:21:07.107 --> 00:21:11.846
But you know, we saw something that could be done better and we actually did it, you know.
00:21:11.846 --> 00:21:16.067
And so before we started Virtue Staff, we had used virtual assistants.
00:21:16.067 --> 00:21:17.844
I know what these companies are like.
00:21:17.844 --> 00:21:24.451
I mean, we did a bunch of trials with different ones and, um, you know, what really did it for me was the impact, you know.
00:21:24.451 --> 00:21:27.105
So we have a virtual assistant that works with us to this day.
00:21:27.105 --> 00:21:27.710
His name's Nathan.
00:21:27.710 --> 00:21:36.019
He's incredible, I mean, he's amazing, you know, um, and it was really seeing the impact on Nathan's life that actually made us full dive into it.
00:21:36.820 --> 00:21:41.512
Um, because, uh, the virtual assistant industry, um is very saturated.
00:21:41.512 --> 00:21:57.297
Um, a lot of people just do it, get somebody in that checks the boxes, pay them about half of what we do and then just expect the churn Difference with us for one, we're very selective.
00:21:57.297 --> 00:21:59.682
A lot of places say 1% get approved.
00:21:59.682 --> 00:22:01.772
I'd like to see what their numbers are.
00:22:01.772 --> 00:22:04.280
I bet it's not 10,000 a week and 1% of that.
00:22:04.280 --> 00:22:07.920
But out of those as well, you know they get a life-changing opportunity.
00:22:07.920 --> 00:22:25.840
I mean, we're paying them double what other agencies are, and so you can only imagine that what we saw in HealthOp was the best match with someone that has the opportunity for something better and they're excited and wherever they're going has an opportunity for them and it resonates, and wherever they're going has an opportunity for them and it resonates.
00:22:25.840 --> 00:22:29.506
It's this win-win thing, and now, with Virtue Staff, we want to make as many win-wins as possible.
