Finding Order in Chaos: How to Launch in a Rapidly Changing Healthcare Landscape w/ Anthony Dohrmann

Many innovators looking to launch a technology-rich product may come into the game with glamorous visions of tech giants and gurus snapping up their innovations and immediate market adoption. But the path to success is less often glamorous and more often long and arduous. It requires a foresight of challenges and the flexibility to pivot when necessary, which is becoming increasingly apparent in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To maximize a product’s chance at success, it’s imperative for an innovator to have a solid understanding of what they can expect when first embarking on their path to product launch. They also need to plan for outliers and the unexpected. 

On today’s episode, Electronic Caregiver Founder and CEO Anthony Dohrmann tells us about his experiences on the path to product launch. He offers insights and strategies on what it’s like to have a radical innovation idea, and the work that goes into seeing it come to fruition.

Here are the show highlights:

• His take on the importance of coordinating input between providers, patients, caregivers, and families

• That even if you have thousands of people telling you that your product is just what the industry needs, a focus group comprised of those who will use your product every day will give you more comprehensive feedback — and help you avoid costly mistakes

• How having a solid understanding of how to secure capital — and how capital requirements may shift as you develop your product — is an often mis-assessed key to the launch process

• How to recognize the silver linings and opportunities presenting themselves as COVID-19 pushes a rapid evolution of the country’s healthcare landscape 

Guest Bio

Anthony Dohrmann is the CEO and Founder of Electronic Caregiver, a company that uses advanced technology and artificial intelligence to create a voice-based virtual caregiver to serve clients based on their needs and resources.

Pushed to pursue his innovative nature through circumstances, Anthony has successfully leveraged his love of technology and drive to change the healthcare landscape into a truly innovative product — and its introduction into the market couldn’t have been better timed.

To learn more about Electronic Caregiver, visit ElectronicCaregiver.com or call 833-ECG-LIFE. 

Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1: And she said she booked an hour for the interview. So that looks good. You've got all the stuff on the wall. I don't know if it's actually going to take the full hour, but that's how, that's how long she, but um, so Tony, can you move over just a little bit to your right? Nope. The other way. Sorry. Um, can you like, it's looking at my stomach. The last thing I want anybody to see it doesn't, I can come over and take away. Yeah, I think we can lower it. Right? So we can lower the camera. Yeah. No, no, no. I think that's good. That's fine. Okay. Yeah.

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okay. You don't need to take the hours. She just, that's just how much she, that's what she walked. Could you hand me my jacket for a sec? Sorry. And can you open my case and grab my temperature thermometer? I didn't take it before I left and I've got scratchy eyes. Okay, well you might want to go 10. Anything else from, let's see, how's he going to connect? I'm using some chap stick. Everybody needs to put their lipstick on before we get started. Okay, now hang on. Now I am testing my temperature before work. Oh look, I'm 98. Yesterday I was 97, three and morning. Good morning. How are you doing? I'm all right. How are you? Good. Are you quarantined?

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Speaker 2: I am definitely. I'm homebound. Have been for um, for at least a week and a half now. My, I think maybe I told you my 90 year old grandma, grandmother lives with us and so I've just been really extra cautious about leaving the house and bringing something home to her.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. Can not afford

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Speaker 2: to leave. Nope. Now is it weird cause they have a camera set up here, but then I want to look at you on my screen and so I'm back. It's not awkward for me at all. I kind of do the same thing. I don't think I have as much distance between the two. Um, but I have a camera up here that I'm looking into, but then I look at my laptop so I can see what your frame than I am. It's okay. You're good. You're good. Honestly, that little temperature thing I thought was a blow dryer and I was like, okay, eat it all now.

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Yeah, I mean you, you probably would maybe not be surprised or be surprised at what I've seen on this show. Um, and I've had women that have gotten on and go, Oh my gosh, this is a video show too. I thought it was just a podcast, hold on your hair, put some lipstick on and they're ready to go. Um, I've had doctors in closets at hospitals. Oh wow. That's so good. It's been a, it's been a fun ride for sure. Yeah. Um, so one of the questions that I have for you is do I call you Anthony or Tony? It's completely up to you. I let you used to be. I was always Tony. Unless I was in trouble then my mother would scream out Anthony Anthony all the time. Okay. Well half the office calls me Anthony, the other half calls me. Tell me, what do you want your target audience to call you?

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Probably Anthony, because that's typically how I'm represented in the market. Perfect. Yep. I think your website is your domain is Anthony, so that, I think that would be important. I guess I shouldn't make a decision. Yeah. If we want them to be able to find you. Um, yeah. Anthony. Okay. Yeah. Um, and just to confirm, you're the CEO and founder, right? That's true. I am the senior yet. Yep. Yup. All right. Just like to make sure I get that. Um, and I say your last name. Um, Dorman. Yup. Okay. Okay. much better than doormat. Yes. Well, I totally botched up the guy's name the other day and I was like, I'm sorry I tried. I gave it my best. You know, everybody always says it correctly. They don't spell it correctly. Right, right. Floating in the middle. Yeah. I always get Roxy without why and it's an IEE, but you know, I'm, I'm not real worried about that. Yeah. So do you have any questions for me before we get started? No. Okay, good. We had a nice talk the other day. We did, I'm working here. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Your background and, yeah. Yeah. Looking forward to this,

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Speaker 1: do you have any question? What's the total, what's the total number of shows you've done at this point?

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Speaker 2: Um, maybe about 65 or 70. Yup. I'm, uh, I'm about a year and a half into it.

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Speaker 1: All right. You're getting a good library.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. Yup. Um, I, I travel a lot and so that's what happens is that, you know, most of the time when I'm in the office, I will do two a week, but then there's weeks, which would equate to about a hundred shows a year. Um, but there's many times where I'm traveling and so I don't produce anything. I have a little dog in the office and she's scratching. Nope.

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Speaker 1: I didn't know. Yeah. I didn't know if it was an animal or a child, but I know that snap,

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Speaker 2: did you use that snap? Oh, right. Hey, look at you. This is my, uh, office personnel. Yeah. Uh, okay. So let's go ahead and get started. Um, you know, I think you and I will have so much to talk about. We'll probably run closer to the 25, 30 minute Mark. And, um, I think that there's probably so many golden nuggets in your story that we might even want to do another episode in the future. Um, cause I don't think we'll be able to cram it all in in the next 30 minutes. Um, but let's do it. Okay. I'm ready. All right. Okay. Welcome to the show COIQ listeners on today's episode, I have Anthony Dorham with me. He is the CEO and founder of the electronic caregiver and, uh, he is going to talk about this groundbreaking innovation Addison and we'll learn more about that today. Welcome to the show, Tony.

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Speaker 1: Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. Tony Anthony, here I go. Right. Uh, so let's start off by telling our listeners a little bit about, um, what you do and what Addison is all about.

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Speaker 1: Well, we are, uh, in evidence-based, we've been heavily involved in research to develop our products, but we're a virtual care company. And so one of the hot subjects right now is all about telehealth, what telehealth can do to carry the burden during this time where we've got this pandemic and um, and we've always been involved in providing telehealth services. But when you look at our population, we have about 48 million older adults who when we have a pandemic are most at risk and that population is about to double in size and the majority of them have at least one chronic illness, many of them two comorbidities. Yep. And so telehealth is very episodic. Aye, a Dr. May schedule a routine visit or you may request a session because you're not feeling well. What we've found is that the biggest challenges in healthcare, um, revolve around outcomes and adherence and a lot of the spending, the majority of the spending with three point $7 trillion is for chronic disease management.

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And then on the treatment adherence side, we've got a problem where, and this is around the world, it's not just in the U S half of all treatment failures. excuse me, half of all treatment failures are attributed to nonadherence. All of this is happening, right? This support for chronic disease is happening, needs to happen in the home. It's a continual process. It's not a periodic episodic process. Yep. So what we wanted to bring was advanced technology that had the capability and the intelligence to be able to unpack day to day a care plan, a treatment plan, and to be able to walk caregivers and patients through that care plan to be able to monitor their progress, their performance, to be able to use artificial intelligence to identify the very earliest stages of decline, uh, functional decline, cognitive decline, to be able to faster see signs of um, uh, infectious disease for instance, to keep with current events.

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And so we wanted to create a virtual caregiver and it was a very big project. People told us it was impossible because to do this well, it involves a lot of different coordination between health stakeholders. You've got the patients and providers and potentially other care teams and family members. And then you've got to have a technology that is simple to use for people that may be suffering or struggling the other side of a diagnosis. Maybe they do have some memory loss or cognitive decline, they might be compromised physically and in other ways. Um, so we wanted to create a voice-based virtual caregiver capable of forming a unique relationship with the user, the customer or patient, something that captivated them where they didn't have to reach out to the technology, technology would reach out and embrace them. And so we've got voice, but sometimes we need to demonstrate Oh, physical therapy routine or we need to remind them how to use one of their peripheral devices to take a vital reading.

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Mmm. And you know, there's a whole host of things that we need to demonstrate. So you, we're all familiar with Alexa, right? Yeah. We loved voice. We were very early on with AWS. I think we wrote the very first health skill for Alexa 2014 but I couldn't form a relationship with the speaker grill and I couldn't get that demonstrative, you know, demonstration capability. So we decided to give that voice, um, a better set of ears, set of eyes, uh, a face, a body, a personality with empathy and humor and basically the brain of a nurse practitioner that might be overstepping a little bit because you can't replace it. But we needed her to be very capable and very intelligent. And so that's what we've created. Uh, it's taken us 10 years. Uh, people said it would cost 500 million. We did it for about $60 million. Uh, it required eight years of putting together a very special screening laboratory and then infusing that with a lot of technology from some of the biggest names in tech.

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Um, we participated with development teams with uh, in development support teams from Microsoft, from Google, from Apple, from AWS and from Intel. And, um, we deployed this laboratory in 32 States. We organized hundreds of providers and senior care professionals. And as we did that, we started learning some other things, uh, that we need to do, address other challenges in the market. For instance, 27% of our children or living with a chronic illness or a disability. And they often require continual oversight. And as you get into these pockets, I'll stop talking cause you never going to be able to ask me a question if I don't stop. Um, well when you get into these pockets of populations of people that are high risk or that need a lot of high touch and a lot of oversight, whether they're cha children going through various developmental stages with a disease or disability or whether you've got an older, you know, a adult who's in, uh, uh, some form of continual decline.

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So much pressure on caregivers and not a lot of resources and support for them. Live care is very expensive. Um, even part time live caregiving for the older adults is beyond the financial reach of 97% of Americans if you look at the income levels and the, the starting cost for part-time care. And so, um, we really had to be effective and, and considerate of these, you know, approximate 15 million family caregivers providing 30 billion hours of service a year and figuring out not only how to care for these, these patients range across all disease spectrums and agents, CAD to be really cognizant of, of, you know, developing support tools for those caregivers that have,

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Speaker 2: I want to talk about. So, you know, what you're describing here is obviously you're solving a lot of different problems when you talk about, um, you know, artificial intelligence and um, virtual reality and voice, it's, it's definitely groundbreaking and revolutionary. And a lot of times we have the perception that this is really exciting cause it is and very glamorous, right? You think about, you know, Steve jobs with the iPhone or Elon Musk with the Tesla. It's like, Oh my gosh, these guys are coming up with something that's just, we never heard of. We didn't even think it was possible. Um, and, and again, you kinda think it's really glamorous. So like walk our listeners through, you know, just some of the realities of what it's like when you're, when you have an idea for radical innovation that no one's ever heard of before, they don't believe it's possible. Um, and you still are holding tight to that dream and having it come to fruition.

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Speaker 1: So from the entrepreneurs and innovators mindset, Mmm, yeah. The, the public, we'll always say, well, look what they've done. And when things take off and get traction, you'll, you'll often hear overnight success. It is the most discouraging, grueling, frustrating journey to do something that's fairly complex. Mmm. And it, it doesn't just take, you know, such as the person who founds it and leads it, who's going to be the continual, you know, cheerleader who's gotta be steadfast and faithful and focused, uh, to the mission. Uh, but you gotta be very, would it developing a team of people who have those same types of qualities when you go out to the market? Like I had gone to Silicon Valley and they said, what is it that you want to do? What are you coming to us for funding for? Yup. Said, well, we're going to build a virtual caregiver, you know, voice edge computing, visual sensing, tying in some wearables, tying in customized plans of care, three D animation.

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You know, I went through this whole list and we said, but that's to get from here to there. There's some other things that happen have to happen. First we're going to develop an enterprise solution to manage our customers, our devices, our care plans to you know, the health data, the security to manage the whole business. And we're going to build this lab and deploy it for at the, we said, you know, four or five years and we're going to coordinate all these tech companies and coordinate all these health professionals and organize thousands of patients to screen. And we've got a roadmap for three products. The third one is the virtual caregiver Addison care. The first two, Mmm. Start to provide some digital health solutions, some connected care we described as simplistic device when we put into the Medicare system that had peripherals and did a lot of health monitoring and medication management, a voice-based in home custom assessments like home exams.

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And then we get to the virtual. I think you should have naive and stupid printed on your form. You're gonna put things out in the market. You have no idea if you can actually monetize them. You don't know if he can get the tech companies. You don't know if you can get the, uh, providers organized to help you organize patients. No idea if any of what you'll collect is viable. The costs are so unknown. This is a project where as you just went through the different components we were adding up, what does it usually costs? Do an enterprise solution? What does it usually take to launch a couple products? What does it take to launch, you know, develop a, uh, go to market, network sales and distribution and support them. And they said, what you've described involves technology that some exist, some in the early stages never been coordinated like this.

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You're talking about a 300 to more likely $500 million plus investment. Nobody's going to back you. You should try to choose one small component. I said, everybody's working on the one small component, but that doesn't re-imagine and transform, right? Yeah. So when you start down this journey sometimes you've got a big vision and you know, when you look at how you get things funded, well there might be one in 500 deals that go to traditional equity funds like venture capital, but actually get to term sheet, but it's probably closer to like one in a thousand that actually gets funded. So what happens to the other 999 entrepreneurs, right? They've got to learn how does structure a capital offer, how to go out to high net worth investors and learn how to have that engagement, that communication, uh, diffuse or overcome, um, their concerns and doubts. And even when you do that, well, you're going to have a much bigger percentage of people telling you no.

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And nobody just says no. They give you a list of all the reasons why there's certain you're going to fail, you know? And if you're, you're did it so you, you feel like your character and integrity and in question at all times because your identity is wrapped up into this, this vision. Yeah. No matter how much you try to say, I don't want work to be my identity who I am as a husband or who I am with my faith and it church. Right. It's all consuming. And so, you know, now if you're lucky enough to get some capital, one of the, I think one of the the most common mistakes is that people completely, mis-assess how much capital they need. For instance, they a lot of times think from, you know, a small team mindset. So if they haven't taken something to market or put a product into production or built a big development team or run a customer service department or gone through and healthcare, uh, you might need to go through clinical trials.

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You might need to get FDA approval. Uh, you might build something that you've got to put patents around. And if it has, you know, telecommunications and it, you might be getting, uh, FCC certification or you will certification. And you know, people think in terms of, you know, if I just get this money, I can do this and I can't do anything. I mean it's the skill sets throughout our building are diverse and there, you know, people that are well-educated, have you had to go through years of a learning curve still and reach out to other mentors? So it takes a big team. We usually think if I can just get this money, I can start building and pay a couple of consultants and outsource a few things and it's going to happen. And so they don't realize in the beginning stages your job is going to be 100% chasing the money and getting the company capitalized.

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We also have the burden of building a team and then managing a team. And if your goodness, you start getting that process down, it becomes more intense because usually in healthcare, health moves slow product development is slow. We're not talking about, you know, app on mobile. Everybody can build an app. Hundreds of thousands of people have done it. That isn't going to transform our issues with global health. Um, it's, it's a component, an extension of, you know, the core platform or, or services. Just like tele-health can't be the core. Um, if you just do the episodic and you're not doing the continuous engagement and monitoring and keeping on track with the care plan, supporting the caregiver, all those other things, early identification, um, you can't transform care. So the things tend to be more complex with longer lead cycles. They're very expensive. And I'll tell you one of the things that people never consider when they're budgeting for their and forecasting mistakes.

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For some reason, everybody thinks it's, there are gonna be mistakes. Mistakes might be on the capital side. You might organize a meeting and host a dinner or serve hors d’oeuvres or, you know, do whatever you can. You try to keep it on the cheap in the beginning. Um, but you travel and you bring prototypes or you're printing for color, you know, illustrative, you know, samples to show people, here's how our marketing is going to look like. Here's our product's going to look. And you get out there and you get nervous because people have been pounding you and filling you with doubt about your own mission and vision and you have a bad talk. Now you've spent thousands of dollars and you have all you've done because of a bad talk or you didn't handle some objectives or somebody hit you with a curve ball. You, you haven't evolved enough to even understand that's a problem yet.

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So you certainly don't know how to answer it. Right. And so that's going to happen over and over and over again. And then when you get into the development, there's mistakes. Mmm. I, you know, I remember. So I had a, a big national security company and I wanted to be the first one to develop kind of a do it yourself professionally monitored plug and go security system. And I had an idea about how it should function and how it should look. And I thought this is going to be great because like people that live in rented apartments and homes get burglarized like 80% more than people that own their homes. I thought this is going to be great for the rental market, am I, my channel was going to be through major retail. And at the time it was a big sell because ADT black and Decker, Bray, Schley, Magnavox and GE, they all categorically failed at the time trying to do this.

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I wasn't just going to sell, you know, some components. I wanted you to activate it like a cell phone for a service. Uh, and it's funny, I'm not gonna mention the names, but even today, you know, more than a decade later, 15 years later, I've seen some big companies make the attempt to do it and haven't been able to do it. We actually put the old program together and until the retailers crashed and went out of business like circuit city and comp USA, um, we had a unbelievable success rate. But while we were doing the development, I created this kind of pyramid looking cool little high tech device. And we actually had purchase orders for tests with like ACE hardware and comp USA at the time. And um, we're in production and I have a sales guy come on board. I finally got enough capital to get somebody who's really seasoned and he said, I am not putting this out.

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And doing the big shows at CES and meeting retail buyers if you've not focused group this. And I said, Howard, you know, I run this big, at the time it was running and managing this big national entrepreneurial seminar business, and I knew everything. I'd been exposed to tens of thousands of deals. I was the consultant to all these other, you know, emerging businesses. So I said, Howard, I put this out in front of thousands of people at the seminar. They all love it. He said, those people have got you on a pedestal. They're not going to be objective.

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Whatever you put out there, they're going to say, if he thinks it's great, I think it's great. So you're getting skewed advice. So we go into these focus groups and I can't wait. I've got the, you know, the two way glass, we're like hitting behind near, and I've got stockholders, they're big ones. And we're in production in China at the time. So they go through the pricing, the name, you know what it's gonna do. Everybody says, you know, wow, that's great. Wow, that'd be really useful. Yeah. You know, I, I could use it, but my mom could use it. And then they unveil it. And I mean, there was this visceral reaction, people like pushed back in their chair and they went, Whoa. I mean, my wife's never gonna let that be in the house like that. Hey, you know, the way you've configured it, like where do you want to plug that in?

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Doesn't, I don't have a convenient phone line. I'd want that part to be separate from the ma. I had to. So we went through two rounds and I had to shut down production in China, call up retailers and tell them, you know, I had a good story. When you have these bad things happen, you better have a good plan that you can explain in great detail. So people say that it happens, which you're, you're taking the information, you're not ignoring and denying it. You're acting. But that was, you know, that was, uh, about a million and a half dollar air and the factory now wonders, they've ordered all these parts, they put thousands of people on these productions and still working you just, and they schedule that in between other bills. So you know, you have to maintain the confidence of your factory, you've got to make sure you can maintain the confidence of your retailer.

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And so we had a good communication for them. And then you now have the expense of redesigning the entire product and then that changes the pricing, the packaging, all the collateral material, all the photography, everything changes. And now you've got to put that out to focus group and make sure you got it right before you take it out in the market. So we're about to do around, have some new focus group studies. We've been, you know, bringing in people that represent actual users. And now we're going in with some of our new product releases and these focus groups, you know, the first small one that we're going to do is about $38,000. It's not cheap. Do three or four of those, I think we probably invested, um, in this project. Uh, gosh, I mean, we must be at a close to a million dollars in legal work on patents. People don't realize how much it can cost.

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Speaker 2: Well, and I want to pause about the product in the focus group because you know, that is just something that is so prevalent in this industry. I was talking to, um, a physician entrepreneur a few weeks ago and you know, it's, it's someone who is Vic keenly aware of the problem because he faces it as a surgeon every day, right? And so he comes up with an idea of how he's going to solve it and he's really excited about it. And, you know, being the perfectionist that he is, puts in every bell whistle feature functionality that you could possibly have. It's in the app store. You can go and download it today and there's been no focus groups, no market research, and really not even a consideration for commercial viability out of his own use case. And, and, and very little resources for actually bringing it to market for actually commercializing it. Um, and it just, like you said, it just, it happens all the time.

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Speaker 1: It, it happens all the time and it's, it's, it's much more expensive than people think to build a product. And, and you know, I've seen something else too, if you've never gone out and done direct sales or, I mean, I've done stuff in big box retail, specialty retail or club retailers, we've done distributor ships. Um, I've been on QVC myself and marketed products on QVC through direct response. And then there's, you know, all of the eCommerce and online components, but they're all very expensive to get from, you know, progress belt to this point. One of the things I've seen over the years over and over again is, you know, the idea person who's not been through all the nuances and, and costs and what needs to be in place to make this successful and very, very big problem. It with engineers. I have this idea I think is going to help people or make a difference or a lot of people are going to love this and buy it so they make stuff they think is cool and it's the wrong approach.

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You've really got to dig deep into who's going to use this product? Who is your ultimate customer? You've got to know everything about that customer. You have to throw a lot of concepts and alternatives in front of that customer and figure out what they actually want, what meets their needs, what they find desirable, what they find useful. You've got to make sure that you can measure how does this work and this is really big. How does this work from a price point? Like can you get this built at a price point that they'll respond and adopt, right? But sometimes people don't realize that the process of compensating the people that will help bring you that customer carry your product to that customer also have to be in the revenue chain. And so sometimes you think you've got your margin set up and then you realize, I don't have enough.

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Like the economics don't work. Um, I see a lot of people and we've actually been a little accused of this, uh, to be honest with you on this particular product, Addison care, right? Um, overbuilding it to some point when you've worked back from the customer and you then you've moved through your channel relationships and looked at how to structure the economics and how to deliver your product and then support it because there's costs and supporting things, especially if they're attached to any kind of service. And sometimes they're not attached to a service, but they are subject to ongoing scrutiny or review or fees for certifications to meet regulatory compliance. So there's always ongoing costs, warranty, replacement. Um, then you work yourself, you know, all the way back to the start and you at some point, once you've answered those questions, you gotta make a decision on minimum viable product and not add every single bell and whistle.

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Um, it's better to get a first product that's, you know, well-designed and provides, you know, great services or benefits to your customer. Let them give you the feedback, what they'd like to hear and in that inexperience can get you in trouble. Because I also see somebody to get a thousand customers and two distributors and one customer, two distributors out of 1,001 to three customers and they're very noisy. They are just demanding that they have this thing or one member of the press and all of a sudden without any in depth study, without taking that to other people, without asking yourself, is this a priority as compared to the other priorities we had previously designated, where should this be in the stack of priorities? They don't do that. They make knee jerk reactions and suddenly there's redesigns, a new marketing literature, a new spins on things and, and you know, it's

00:35:03:06 --> 00:36:18:11

Speaker 2: no, you're in a hole that you weren't even really intending to be in and now your whole product development has been taken over by your customers and you know, yet worked for them. I mean that is a, that is a very common pitfall. Um, in the, in the, in the innovation process is that, you know, you've got the, those, those customers that buy first, those innovators, there's early adopters, they're visionaries. They want the competitive edge. They're the ones that buy first. That's why they buy. Right. And so then once they buy, you know, their vision stop, their competitive advantage doesn't stop. They want to do this next and do this next and they're so excited and it's so easy to kind of get caught up in that momentum, especially depending on where you are in your financial situation. Right. I mean, I might, I might have feel like I have some, um, um, responsibility or requirement to continue to develop what they want because I need to keep the lights on if I don't have enough cash. Um, and then before you know it, you're just, like I said, in a completely different business and you're like, wait a minute, how in the world did we get here? And that whole radical differentiation strategy that you started off with is just completely diluted. Yeah. There's

00:36:18:11 --> 00:37:47:06

Speaker 1: such a balance between not letting the distractions, um, and understanding with good experience and discernment. Um, and it didn't have a process in place to interpret what you should respond to and what you shouldn't. You gotta hold your focus to get to a viable product, but you bring up another great point, which is, you know, evolving the product adaptation, the ability to pivot, to get something out there. Successful people will find other ways to apply this product into other places, right? Um, and sometimes we get people that are so riveted. Now here's a big thing, a big cause of this. It comes back to capital again. They get so focused they won't adapt. There's a lot of founders won't adapt business models. It's hard to walk the line of pushing through and holding your focus and not letting disruptions come in and take you off track. And knowing that there are times to diversify, times to develop. Um, you know, times to pivot. I, uh, we've had to do a lot of pivoting because of a CLV ID 19, right? Coven night, big pivots and the business we've had all kinds of business. You know, structure set up for going to market. Um, yep. I

00:37:47:06 --> 00:38:07:11

Speaker 2: think it's crazy that we have is like whatever strategy we had in place, put the brakes. Now we need a covert strategy and rightfully so because it's, you know, what we, the assumptions and the strategies and tactics that we believed were going to be most effective last week aren't necessarily going to be our best path this week.

00:38:07:22 --> 00:39:21:10

Speaker 1: Well, and I really feel for, I mean, I, there are going to be the layoffs and job losses are in the millions. Um, and you know, for some people, you know, this is going to be a breaking point for other people to be a making point, right? Uh, there might be some people out there that have had dreams on the shelf and different ideas and maybe this will be the thing that urges them to finally pursue that thing that they've always wanted to do for a living every day. Um, you know, there was a point where it at a point in time, many years ago that that happened for me, it was through unexpected circumstances. I am done this, you know, entrepreneurial quest, right? Um, Oh, you know, I said there was that one key skillset. I think the ability, and this really spreads through the whole organization, the ability to, to develop capital, um, because it's really about developing belief and support and compelling the people around you to get behind your mission, your purpose and what you're going to deliver and, and how you're going to transform the human experience and your unique way.

00:39:22:13 --> 00:40:16:17

It is the master skill. Because like I said earlier, most equity funds, VCs, angel groups, it will, they'll reject, you know, all but one in a thousand deals and they're inundated. It's hard to even get into the lineup to even have one shot. Um, and it can be very difficult to deal with. Right? So you see a lot of, um, uh, you see a lot of deals where, and you just go on and search the internet. People have sold away their, their companies. Um, I see people that come and want to pitch for a job here and they, they've been involved in a senior leadership position and three different venture backed deals. And I say, no, if you had done this right and been smart enough, you would have become the VC after your first deal or your second deal. You wouldn't be on your third or fourth VC deal.

00:40:17:11 --> 00:41:15:06

Getting involved with founders that are selling away everything. And it's tough because people don't see that coming. There's initial seed round and then suddenly you need another development round and then all of a sudden you need some go to market money and then you need growth money. So these different stages through development and different needs and they typically are increasing over time. So you go out and you leverage your home and you drain your bank account or pull money from a 401k your kid's college fund money. And now that's normal. Now you got, you know, get connected with some lawyer. It helps you put a little offering together, but it doesn't have any experience with structuring a business. It's not how you're going to capitalize your startup. It's how you're going to capitalize it all the way through to some form of, um, you know, where it can continuously sustain itself and become very profitable.

00:41:15:10 --> 00:41:48:20

Or you get to an exit where you're acquired or um, you know, you, you go to an IPO and so you know, you have to think long term. So they all, they'll drain their own resources beyond the brink of disaster and, and collapse. Finally figure out how to get some friends and family money in, but didn't structure the deal to give the room or set the expectation in advance for the larger capital come in later. Now they get out to a venture firm and maybe the venture firm likes it. This happens over and over again. There is the group of the deals they like.

00:41:49:03 --> 00:41:49:11

Speaker 2: Yup.

00:41:50:01 --> 00:42:05:02

Speaker 1: By the time that deal's done and you know, people ever see this gun, they'll say how much money you got in the bank. Yeah. I get, you know, I have X. So that's roughly based on your burn rate. Um, three months. Yeah. Okay. Well we'll talk in four

00:42:11:00 --> 00:42:11:10

Speaker 2: here.

00:42:14:01 --> 00:42:56:20

Speaker 1: There'll be on the brink of disaster and they need this money and it's a very difficult place to be in because when that deal gets structured with that VC, should it go forward? You're going to see founders and founding stockholders get watered down, diluted, lose any form of say so. And you know, you see over and over again. Yeah. It got funded and it went out, became very successful. And I got my principal back and I, you know, I got a, I got a nice modest return back. The big money that came in later, you know, made thousands of percent on the dollar. Right? 3000% on the money, 5000% on them. Some of them even bigger than that.

00:42:56:24 --> 00:42:59:13

Speaker 2: All the work, very little return little work.

00:43:00:04 --> 00:43:35:06

Speaker 1: And it's so terrible for those that did all the heavy lifting. Yeah. And you know, I, but I always say, you know, the entrepreneurial is a great adventure. If you had told me all the things that could go wrong, all the setbacks, unforeseen challenges, if you told me what it was gonna cost, right. Especially in the earlier deals I did when I was younger and the complexity, I never would have started. Sometimes it's better, you know, you need to know. But sometimes it feels like it's hard because if you didn't know, you wouldn't even begin 100 things you need to get on the hook.

00:43:35:24 --> 00:45:02:00

Speaker 2: So, so one, um, one other question that I have before we start to wrap up here. Um, you know, we're all, we talked about COBIT 19 and we're all shifting gears here. You know, what are everybody's talking about? Um, the, the layoffs and the unemployment and you know, just all of the negative components of it as an entrepreneur, what is most exciting to you? Um, you know, and not thinking about this as, Oh, I'm an opportunity, um, opportunist and I'm going to start, you know, selling some sleazy snake oil. You know, like we're talking about ethical things and moral things that, um, entrepreneurs can do. Because you mentioned early, earlier, and I think that's very true, that every single business out there is that this crossroad, it's going to be the time that they either go belly or it is going to be a catapult for growth, unimaginable growth that they never even could have predicted. So as you kind of start to pivot in your own company, and I know this is, you know, evolving daily and it's so, it's very, very dynamic. You, you, you may not have even thought through all of this. Okay. So what is most exciting to you as you think about how you're going to leverage the opportunities that are in the silver lining in all of this, um, chaos that we're facing?

00:45:02:20 --> 00:46:02:09

Speaker 1: Well, there are, um, so first, once you learn your capital, I think the next most important thing beyond team-building is contingency plans. You ought to think about them in advance. I don't care how good you think you are. Your factory partner is at some point you're going to update some firmware or software somewhere and it's going to introduce a bug and there'll be some product recall or need to pivot, right? I've been through complete catastrophic collapses of all national distribution changes. The worst market correction in history. That 2008, 2009 it was, was very difficult, but a lot of people out of business. And so now when we look at things, we say, what is everything that could go wrong and how are we going to respond to it? Um, this particular current event with this particular pandemic and we've seen bird flu, swine flu, SARS, and this is a form of SARS, right?

00:46:02:09 --> 00:47:05:01

I mean, it's technical name is, you know, it's SARS, hyphen cov, you know, hyphen 2. Um, and it just attacks the respiratory system. Here's what's, here's what's great about this. For us personally, we were in a position where we immediately could start helping people in the areas they need an L. um, and it became very apparent when the first case is showed up here the same day we were literally starting to sign up our own staff so that we could monitor them for temperature and symptoms at home. We do it in morning and at night to make sure that they don't enter the workplace if there infected and expose the faculty. Right. Well that immediately translated to home care companies, senior living providers, people started realizing, I've got to monitor my own staff. There's huge liability to my resident population or to my other health care workers or my patients in a surgical center.

00:47:05:07 --> 00:48:03:02

So suddenly people start coming to us and it's not just about the patients, it's about the people serving the patients. Now we're monitoring and protecting them. But you know, this, this is going to happen again. Last year we had one of the most resilient, most destructive strains of influenza. And what's happened through this event is, um, the, the, the focus on connected care. We've been hearing for decades. You can't do it with outdated infrastructure and we can't do it with the minimum number of beds. But we have 130 million people with chronic illnesses and we've got a 48 million, you know, population of chronically ill, older adults. That's doubling in size in three decades. Right? How do you fix that in that short period of time? So for years of an errand, we have to extend support for care outside the doctor's four walls and into the home.

00:48:03:13 --> 00:49:13:10

And what this event has created worldwide is now connected care is, is getting in spotlight. Now we're going to be able to show, you know, we've started Medicare as a reimbursement for monitoring patients at home. So we have a lot of older adults that are chronically ill and we're monitoring them and it's a reimbursed service for the doctor and for the service. And we started working with diabetics and we looked at a three so the first thousand patients that went on that were the Medicare patients, we looked at 300 diabetics and they're HBA. One C levels were literally dropping across the board as they continued to use our service because the support we were providing in the home was helping them more effectively manage their disease. We had a practice put on a first group of patients in Mississippi and the doctor had just made a blood pressure change and because of the monitoring at home and everything happening in real time, this patient took a reading, had a blood pressure, is 70 over 30 immediately.

00:49:14:02 --> 00:50:06:06

A nurse triage team through our smart hub was connected to the patient concurrently notifying the family. And then carried the message instantly to the physician who said, we just made a change. How would I, I wouldn't have known, you know, until potentially some catastrophic things could have happened, right? The next thing you know, she gets dizzy, she falls, she got broken hip and a head trauma, right? So these things really make a difference. Now the opportunists out there, figuring out how can I transform my app real quick and go out and tell people that they can work through their mobile device and kind of self triage and stuff that's, that isn't going to do it. People aren't going to continue to apps and menus and decision trees in it. They need something that's more capable and also more user friendly. And it's got to be connected into the ecosphere in a much more dynamic way.

00:50:06:15 --> 00:50:52:12

And I think we'll see it now as people are talking about digital health connected care. It's time to start looking at technology in the home to improve outcomes, to reduce pain and suffering, to stop people from having those head traumas and broken hips through early identification and expediting intervention. And because now they're finally opening up, they're opening up greater access, uh, greater, uh, reimbursement resources. And what they're going to see virtually overnight is just how effective this really is. And it's the birth of an entire new global industry. And it's literally the moment we're going to truly transform the healthcare industry. That's what I'm excited about.

00:50:52:17 --> 00:51:40:15

Speaker 2: Completely agree with you. I mean, I think that, you know, when you look at the technology adoption curve and you're coming out to market with something and you see this small little market that's gonna buy and adopt first, right? And you've got this gigantic piece of the market that's like the laggards right in the late and early majority. And they want to hear like they want, they are, they're not buying for many years. Right? And, and, and that's part of the challenge that we've had in the system is that, you know, people, brilliant minds like yourself have innovated these really exciting ways for us to really transform the healthcare system. And there's been regulatory and legislative barriers and hurdles that's been challenged to overcome. And then you just had all these laggards in the late majority adopters that are just like, I'm not ready yet. And that's changing.

00:51:40:23 --> 00:52:11:07

Right. Um, and so we're going to see this trajectory of adoption just like you described. And I think once people, um, you know, physicians that were like, I'm not doing tele-health patients that were like, I want to be my baby with my doctor in person, you know, that's going to be changing. And once they get a taste of, Oh, this is really not so bad, this is actually more convenient, this is actually more effective, they're not going to want to go. Oh, huge chunk of those people are not going to go know what to go back to the way it was before coven 19.

00:52:11:11 --> 00:53:11:02

Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree with you on a percent. I've seen, you know, it's been interesting that here's this huge at risk population, the chronically ill that are older adults. Right. And the benefit's been in place now for over a year and I'm surprised at the physicians that have not picked it up. Now they have to use good discernment because everybody, like I said, is throwing an app and just give them one device and download this app and you can put this out and get reimbursed for, you know, doing remote patient monitoring. That doesn't work. You've got to make sure that you have redundancy and security. If you lose power, if you lose internet, there should be emergency response. There should be medication management. Everything should be happening in real time. It shouldn't just be, I decide to look up some of the charts in a week, right? We're taking readings, we're seeing they're out of threshold or we're seeing they were prompted to take a reading and they didn't take the reading and we're engaging in real time, so they have to make good decisions.

00:53:12:01 --> 00:54:18:20

You know, one of the other great things about this moment in time is that, yeah, we're going to get struck again. Like I started to say before, as soon as we get through this, we're going to have another rampant influenza season every single year. And it hits the same members of the population except, um, it takes the younger as well. Right, so we're not seeing as many kids. It takes more children. It's still taken down the and the numbers are Epic still taken down the older adults. So now that we've made this transition, I think that the world's going to be really surprised to see with some of the new skillsets in some of the new practices and some of the new sanitation routines, some insane to now be able to use this technology to suppress the spread of influenza every year and the damaging consequences and reduce the mortalities and long-term complications through that early identification, better management of the process, getting in there early and starting to immediately put in practices.

00:54:18:20 --> 00:55:01:07

Right. You look at, we've got a whole adult living assisted living, nursing homes, independent living facilities for older adults. Yeah. Monitoring now their staff and monitoring all of their patient. You know, the residents who many are patients and saying, we're never going to stop doing this right now. Right. And the, the influenza spray, now we're going to be able to make sure that an effective worker doesn't come in and wipe out our resident population and we're going to be able to know who do we need to corn down and get treatment to who might have otherwise infected 120 or 180 other residents. It's going to change everything.

00:55:01:15 --> 00:55:35:18

Speaker 2: Yup. Yup. Yup. I completely agree. Well, I'm glad we were able to end on a positive note, um, and all of the opportunities that are hidden and maybe even not so hidden in, in, um, what we're facing today. So Anthony, thank you so much for your time and sharing your wisdom with our listeners. Um, it's been great and I appreciate your candor and transparency. Um, how can folks get ahold of you if some of our listeners have some questions, um, either about your solution or just about your business end sites?

00:55:36:01 --> 00:56:19:18

Speaker 1: So we have a pretty simple number to remember. We've got eight, three, three and it's electronic caregiver, right? So it's eight, three, three ECG, life, eight, three, three ECG, life. And the easiest way, uh, online is to just look for electronic caregiver. You'll find our website, it's electronic caregiver.com. Um, and they can learn about Addison and see this new, you know, lifelike talking, incredible interactive friend and care partner and caregiver and nurse and, you know, so they can see some really amazing stuff that we're developing as well as some of the incredible solutions that we're deploying right now for government and facilities and patients for us country.

00:56:20:04 --> 00:56:31:20

Well, I look forward to staying in contact with you to see how, um, you grow in the next few months and, um, the years to come based upon what happening. Thank you. All right. Thank you.