Intro: 00:00

Marc Freedman: Welcome to this week's episode of Profits With Purpose. I'm Marc Freedman, and today we have our guest, Richard Palarea, CEO and founder of Kermit, a Baltimore-based healthcare cost-reduction and spend-management company, bringing automation insight to the high spend category of implantable medical devices within hospitals and health systems.

Since its founding in 2011, the company has saved hospitals more than $200 million. Prior to co-founding Kermit, Richard was the Co-founder and CEO of PA and Associates, a national leader in the Transportation Spend Management arena. Richard's work has been featured in the New York Times Microsoft startup stories.

The Baltimore Business Journal recognized his firm is one of the fastest growing privately held businesses in one of the area's largest turnaround and management companies. Richard, welcome to Profits With Purpose.

Rich Palarea: Thanks, Marc. It's a pleasure to be here with you on the show.

Marc: Thanks. So tell me how did you end up in spend management? What's your background that led you into that?

Rich: No background whatsoever. I was actually gainfully employed by others doing many other things, when my wife came to me and said, telecom had gone through deregulation. She was selling long distance T1 lines to big companies. At the risk of insulting her on the show, so she couldn't tell you what a T1 line is today, but she was one of MCI's top sales people in the nation. And we went through this whole thing with the whistleblower thing at MCI and then deregulation all that happened. And she started a cost reduction company where she took the knowledge she gained during that sales process about where prices ought to be.

And she would renegotiate those minutes, those fees with the big telcos on behalf of her clients. And if she saved the money, she'd take a portion of the savings. And so she would go out and sell all day long. I would go off to work, I'd come home, we'd eat dinner and she'd say, this is everything I sold. Now you do the work.

And so at night and weekends, this is before the kids were born, I was doing all the analytics, I was doing all the marketing, I was producing invoices, and it kind of grew into this very interesting appreciation of the intersection between data and the lack of transparency that most businesses have with regard to how things are billed for.

So, phone companies keeping kind of this whole data area obscure. Don't really know what you're gonna pay. We tell you it's gonna be this, but when you get your bill, it's something else. Oh, but there's surcharges and taxes and all that other stuff. We kind of parlayed that as years went on into spend management, and cost reduction for transportation services.

Big, big shippers around the nation that were using FedEx, DHL, UPS style services, and taking that same idea and demystifying how that pricing works and how that final bill gets to you. And again, if we can save you money by getting the price down to the street level where it ought to be, we'll take a portion of that savings as our fee.

Very easy model typically to sell to most CFOs who are very business-minded people. It's all about the bottom line. I love it. I love the risk that you're taking. Go do it. And that's how Kermit came to be. I was actually introduced to my two co-founders who were former medical device reps who stood in the operating room with surgeons during hip and knee surgery, tendering devices into the sterile area where they go into the patient and then tallying all of that on a piece of paper and writing down the price they expect to get paid and then

marching that piece of paper down the hallway to the buyer who didn't have any understanding clinically of why the surgeon chose to use what he or she did in the surgery, but just basically stroking a check or issuing a purchase order. So I saw a lot of parallels between the different things I had done and how we could actually apply a lot of those same methodologies to this broken area in the operating room.

And it's been done that way for 50 years. I was-, I grew up the son of a cardiologist. I grew up in a healthcare family, but I didn't have any insight to how this all worked until they came in and told me. So I was fascinated by it and that was 10 years ago, and that's why we started Kermit. Because what we do for a living is spend management and we do it based on a success basis with no risk to the client.

Marc: Anyhow, so we've obviously already discussed, my next question would be, what made you decide to start your own firm? I think we've got a good insight to that part, but let's talk now about the challenges that you have when you start a new business and how you overcome that?

Rich: Well, one thing, I'll go back to the previous question I think what's maybe interesting for the listeners is, I wasn't looking to start something, and so I really had freedom in thinking about this idea. A lot of businesses start, or the entrepreneur gets into this because yes, they see a need. Yes, it's interesting. Yes, it's the intersection of their gifting and their talent and all of that, but many times it's driven out of: I've gotta make a living, right?

So, because I already had a going entity, my judgment wasn't clouded by that. So much so that when I heard this story, when these gentlemen walked in and told me about how this all works, I thought for a minute and said, I could forget I ever had this conversation. I can go back to what I'm doing, because I already have income, I have a business, and it's doing well. And I thought about it overnight and I'm like, I can't let this go on.

Like this is something that grabbed me and I don't know if it was that I had been exposed to the business of healthcare by helping my dad run his practice, his cardiology practice. So whatever it was really grabbed me and I thought, you rarely get something that is, that can help the patient, that can help the hospital, that's altruistic in its approach, that is at the intersection of healthcare and technology, really hot area. It just kind of checked all the boxes for me and that's why I kind of said, okay guys, I'm in. Let's do this. I mean, it was a risk obviously, to try something new, but I'm so glad we did it. It's really bringing a lot of fulfillment and enjoyment.

It's dealing with this with hospitals every single day and really helping them get a handle on this is a really good thing to be doing. So the challenges, honestly, and I don't know if it's like this for you and your team, Marc, have really been the biggest competitor I have is my prospect hospital. It's who I'm selling to. It's when I show up and show them we just looked at the data, we can save you $20 million, isn't that great? And they say, yeah, I don't know if we want this like just right now, if it's that much money, we should probably take a shot at getting it on our own. Then maybe we'll have you back in or some kind of lack of willingness to have a third party come in and really help them.

So there isn't any database we can subscribe to that gives us the cultural blueprint. We can see how many beds and how much spend and everybody's a candidate, but we really don't know until we show up. Are they open to third parties helping them? Will they embrace this even though we wanna make them the star? Will they be willing to accept that? And so, it's not for everybody. It is terribly disruptive in the best way. We're bringing a lot of visibility to a lot of cockroaches that are skirting around in the dark. We flip the lights on all of a sudden, and that's the process we're doing, and I'll say that.

And at the same time, there are many hospitals who really love the approach. They want to be the best, they want to get better. They're not afraid of turning over a rock and then dealing with what they see and they want to go after it and tackle it. But it's also been really challenging in the middle of the season we're in with a global pandemic and all of that that comes with that in healthcare.

I mean, from my experience, especially dealing in the medical space, it always seems to be whoever's in charge of the finance department, and typically we'll call them a CFO. They carry many different titles, but we'll just go with that one for now. They're afraid that what you find is going to cost them their career. And so a lot of times that's where we see from our side doing the same thing, similar things that you're doing from across all the different spend categories inside the medical space.

We find that to be where the objections usually come from. Well, let me talk to my CFO. This is never going to happen. Say, well, because, and then you tell them the same thing I just iterated and they're like, no, that can't be okay. You're right it can't be, and then you never hear from them again. They go real quiet, right? And running a relatively small business, I mean, we're 24 employees now, I think that the ten-year mark, you have to have discipline, I think as somebody in my seat as a CEO, because you have to quickly dispense of that conversation in a professional way if you're not ready to buy, I have to bow out and I have to get to the person who's in line behind you, because they probably are ready to buy.

So I have to quickly work through that process. And I didn't always have that level of maturity. Honestly, when we started this, I'm like, everybody needs this. Everybody's going to want it. It's so logical. Nobody's going to say no to it. Why would anybody say no? And so I'd stay very long at the party trying to convince somebody that you have to do this. And what I realized is it's better just to move on. It's just a no for right now. They're probably a later adopter. We'll come back and talk to them later.

Marc: Absolutely. That's a great way of looking at it. So let's talk about your movement from the transportation sector into the medical space and while the process itself was pretty similar, were there anything, any skills that you in the transportation space, that allowed you to quickly adopt the healthcare space without any issues?

Rich: So two come to mind right away. I think being very comfortable with analytics, whether that was processing a bid to compare it against the last bid and see, are they able to improve it? How do you do that? How do you build that in a way that you're not reinventing the wheel every single time you get a brand new file? Are there things we could do?

So that started very early with things like Microsoft Excel and then building macros around Excel and then building a data import process in Excel, and then you outstrip the ability of Excel to do that. So you move to access and then you move to SQL, whatever that migration was. At Kermit, we pretty quickly bumped up against a limitation of that because of the sheer number of surgeries with the different combinations and permutations of parts. Outstrip the ability to do that at the desktop, which is why we had to actually go build our own app in a custom app environment.

So the analytics were very comfortable for me. I wasn't afraid of that. That was stuff I really like to get lost in the data. I could do that for a full day. The other thing that translated very quickly was the ability to build a request for proposal. A real one that has the real utilization patterns, like, and try to convince our clients you don't hide that stuff like supply-chain people tend to not wanna give suppliers all the information because they're being protective. 

It's better for the bidding community to have all that information because they typically will get you a better price if they can understand their margins. So build a proper RFP, with real utilization patterns, issue it with a realistic timeline, but one that's a little bit of a stretch so that you're controlling the process, it's not controlling you by the supplier, and working through that.

And then also the negotiation skills, and I know you can probably teach that stuff, but to the extent that it was very natural, bringing that from telecom through transportation spend management and parcel shipping up to where we are today in hospitals, it's actually the same skillset. And understand that a true negotiation isn't one party losing and one party winning. It's finding what each party wants and wants to get out of that transaction, making sure they both get it without compromise. That's a true win for everybody.

So, how do you do that, so the supplier feels like they got what they need and then the hospital feels like they got what they need, which is cost reduction and a handle on this really complex category? So, those were the skills that translated directly. There were a lot of other things that didn't at all, that were a big surprise that I had to kind of figure out on the fly , and that's a different story.

Marc: So, I would say, with technology being a main driver in you creating your own dedicated application, how has technology changed in the last decade that's helped you reduce costs for the hospital sector that you couldn't do before 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago? I mean, you can pick the time frame.

Rich: Yeah, so let's go back and let's name it. Probably 15 to 20 years ago I was employed by a technology staffing company. There were staffing IT support, help desk. This'll date it, LAN and WAN engineers in the types right. It was a very innovative company. It was the first who pioneered having a studio in the local office where they would do a video interview of the candidate and then use algorithms and matching, and again, 20 years ago, when bandwidth was very expensive to push out video, and in that I ran a couple of different technology projects and ran some tech teams in addition to what else I was doing.

And so that was traditional architecture, traditional dev stack. It was buying a lot of pizza, buying a lot of Mountain Dew and keeping everybody happy, and making sure we're delivering on time and budget. And these were very long projects with big budgets attached to them. Fast forward to where we are now, we decided to bring Kermit to life using one developer and a shoestring budget. We did it in nine months and that was not possible back in the other realm. And it was this whole advent of low code.

Now it's vogue. Now everybody's doing some low code thing; you have lots of vendors who offer it. But back then, 10 years ago, it was mainly because in the transportation business, in a full month I would work for three weeks of the month in doing the projects and selling and doing all the analytics and the bidding. And I'd have to take a week off at the end of the month to do all the billing, and I'd start at the As and by Friday I'd get to the Zs. It was a manual process. No matter what I did to build macros and automate stuff, it just took that long and I said, while this is a nice lifestyle business and it's putting some money in my family's bank accounts, it's not sustainable. It's not. It's not gonna grow this way.

So I went to a friend of mine, I said, here's my problem. Can you automate this? What I wanna do is I wanna push a button on Friday and I wanna bill everybody. And he said, give me $5,000; give you about a month. And he went away, did some prototyping along the way, and he came back to me, and I was blown away. This was all done in low code on a platform called Mendix, which is now owned by Siemens, and I was able to, at the end of this, push a button, it billed everybody and it was five minutes, it was all done. The invoices were sent up by email and I said, why didn't I do this sooner? This is amazing. I said, if I ever start another company, this is a winner. I'm going to come back to you. We're going to use this technology and didn't have any inkling about Kermit at the time, but when we realized we had made a bet to bill people off savings and we didn't have any way of processing that data, we said we're gonna need a software platform.

So I called that same developer back and said, here's our next problem. He said, no issue. Let me, take a crack at it. And yeah, he built what is Kermit today. He's no longer with us because what he really wanted to do is he wanted to run a boutique firm that, that solved small companies problems with technology. So once he brought Kermit to life, he took his leave, we brought in another Mendix developer, and we are on Mendix today. It's a really wonderful platform for anybody who's interested in the technology mendix.com.

Marc: Very interesting. So let's talk about Kermit, the name.

Rich: Obviously, it's making you think about something without infringing anybody's copyrights or their intellectual property, you're thinking of probably the Muppet.

Marc: Obviously.

Rich: So, when we had built the software, the guy who had the one push-one button, it works, developed the software for us, we had a willing hospital who said, sure, we'll be the alpha site. We would love to try it. I think what you're building, if you could digitize this paper-based process, it's a nightmare and if you could tell us what's okay to pay and what isn't in an instantaneous way - that's a game changer. We wouldn't have people who have to screen this stuff and we'd be leaking all of this money.

So we had a willing hospital with real patients, real data. We had a developer who had developed it. Well, we didn't have a brand, we didn't have a name. The name of the company at the time was PA and Associates Healthcare. And it was only PA and Associates because that was the name of my logistics company. We had the entity, we had the shell, we could go to market that way.

We looked around the environment, we looked at the ecosystem, and everything in the hospital was acronym based. It felt like the government, no personality, no sense of playfulness, nothing. What's the thing that we do really well? We walk into this area that most hospitals don't want to deal with. They don't wanna fight with their surgeons about which implants you can use.

We're gonna take away all your toys, and they don't like being embattled against people who are selling them this technology and using all this techno speak to keep them confused. We come in and we make it easy. So we sat down to name it and I had Jason, my partner, and John, my partner, just the three of us at the time.

And I said, before we go down this exercise, because we could be doing this for a long, it felt like naming a band, we could be here forever. So let's think about this. Let me try to put a framework around this to kind of guide it. And I said, at the beginning of the movie, I think it's Spielberg, where the kid sits on the edge of the moon. He casts the fishing pole out, and the ripples go out from the water and it hits the water and the music plays. I said whatever the essence of that feeling is, I wanna bring that to the brand. So think about that as a name. Like we're making things easy, it's almost childlike. We take away all the worry, whatever it is.

And so we started to throw out names and I have this great business partners name is John. He's a big thinker. He's a big idea guy. He talks and then he thinks it was one of those types of guys, and we love him for it because he comes up with the best ideas and he said, Kermit, and everything stopped and we said, are you kidding me? We'll get our face sued off. It'll never work. We'll never get a trademark on it. And we said, forget that. That'll never work. It's just too childlike. It's not gonna work. And for another 15 minutes we went round and round with other names, we came back to it and said, you know what? If we can pull that off, we get everything we want.

We're gonna get that instant feeling You had a second ago Marc, which is like, that takes me to a place. I know Kermit makes me feel a certain way, but the attorneys. Nothing green and nothing frogs. You just can't, you can't go there. So we had a lot of really good logos. We crowdsourced our initial logo and had a lot of really good imagery of, none of it we could use.

But the name stuck. We got a trademark on the name, we registered the trademark for the logo. It all worked. And if I turn my camera around, if I had the ability to do that, it's all hardwired in, but my bookshelf on the other side of my computer is full of frog stuff that our clients have sent us over the years. It's embraced. It's doing what it's supposed to do and definitely take this category seriously. It's, a big spend area, but we don't take ourselves all that seriously. We have fun. It's a very technology driven type of culture and organization. For the most part. It's younger people who are here and so, yeah, we have a very kind of playful family style culture here and a lot of it is attributed to that name.

Marc: So cool. So let's talk about culture for a second. In your company and how you promote it and then what you do, because Profits With Purpose, you know what our company is designed, is giving back and creating an impact in the world with our clients and from the dollars that we get paid from our clients, we make donations on their behalf to something that's important to them.

So let's talk about, what you guys are doing at Kermit, and your culture, and how you guys making the world place besides the fact that you're helping the healthcare spend area, which is obviously something that's really out of whack all over the place.

Rich: Yeah. So I think that's the obvious one, right? And kind of feel like we're the guys who wear the white hat and maybe we didn't always do that. I mean, we were on the other side of this equation for many years. The way that these implants are sold is there's a manufacturer, but they don't sell directly to the hospital. There's a distributorship in every market, and those distributorships are independently owned, so they're businesses. They're aligned to the manufacturer; they might have an exclusive, but they're owned by an owner and their shareholders, maybe there's a CEO as a typical business, and you have sales people who are tasked with going out and doing these surgeries, selling implants to surgeons, selling them to hospitals, keeping the price high, keeping the margins high.

And so I think when we started the business, the main thing that was very freeing for Jason and John was, we're doing something altruistic, we're helping demystify this category for people who are just getting, basically just getting screwed all day long. They don't know what they don't know, so, there's a really good feeling of purpose in all of that. The culture here was one that we felt like these guys came from being up at four o'clock or 5:00 AM every day putting on scrubs, going to the hospital, dealing with high pressure environments. Dealing with people who were the smartest people in the room for sure.

But they knew it and they acted on it, and those were the surgeons. So it's a very high pressure environment and it really took me as the other partner and CEO of the company a little while to kind of deprogram them, hey guys, you can show up at eight o'clock. It's not a problem.

And you don't have to wear what you're used to wearing. If you want to wear shorts and t-shirts, it's fine. The essence of that was all about how can we have a family environment and honor the fact that we're all fathers, we're all married. If we need to leave to take one of our children to the doctor or our pet to the vet, or whatever, can we have an environment that really honors that?

And not really hold people to task about the hours they're working. But let's go the opposite way. Let's have this kind of freedom to come and go as you please. As long as the work's getting done, we're not gonna hold anybody to a, "you weren't at your desk". So this family culture became very important and it started to kind of grow in its own.

And what amazed me, Marc, about this was, it's probably scary for some entrepreneurs, some business owners, to think about that. If I let people work out of their house and I don't know what they're doing, am I getting all the production I need, are they abusing that? What I find is that human beings, for the most part, if you hire the right people and you put them in the right seats, they tend to manage that so much so that they'll actually put in typically more work and more hours than you ever asked them for.

We have our lead developer for the software. He's a volunteer firefighter and EMT, and one of the things he does while he's at home working and building, punching out code and doing that, he has his phone on his desk that has all the area calls coming through, and if there's a motor vehicle accident and it's within striking distance from his house, we let him go answer the call.

But I also see him logged on at 10 o'clock at night pushing code out. So that served us well. I don't know how long we can go to do that, how big we can really get and still manage that. But today, who we are, it works with the name, it works with the style of our management, it works with our building little business inside of our big business where people have ownership and autonomy and creative right, and license.

But they have guardrails because this is their department. They know if they need help from marketing, they'll crossover, they'll ask the marketing person who owns his business or her business. And that's been really a key hallmark of how we've done this. The way that we've started to give back, and I would love to be very intentional, maybe like you guys have, is, pick something that the hospital can actually have a stake in.

Like, we want this to go to this foundation, right? And be intentional. Today the way we've done it is we have an annual meeting where we pull people in. I think we're in eight states now, so we fly everybody in for the annual. We spent a couple days working together on different problems. We have inspirational speakers and we have fun events and dinners and things we do, but we always do one event that is a way to give back to a particular organization.

So we've had, in the past, we've built bikes for charity. So they bring in the bikes and boxes and parts, and there's a contest. We break up into teams. Who can answer the most trivia questions to get the parts you need to build the bike and who's first to do it? There's a prize for that, but those bikes go to Boys and Girls Clubs.

Last time we did this was just a few months ago, and we had a miniature golf course building contest. Broke up into teams and never had to build a hole. With the different obstacles and everything, they all had the same materials and parts and everything. And all of that we actually brought in, canned goods, as part of what we did.

We used food items, cereal boxes, canned goods, and all this to build the golf courses. All of that food went to a local food bank here in Maryland. So those types of things that I think where we can start to connect our mission and doing good to other organizations, and like I said, I'd love to be in a place where we think very purposefully about this and really connected to our customers.

That would be the next step. That would be great.

Marc: Yeah, so I think, today, I mean, love what you're doing. I think that's great. It's great team building. It's great giving back to the community the way you're doing it. Like I mentioned, for us, we let the business that we're helping decide whether that money should go to a non-profit and if it's a non-profit can go back to them, or whether it's a civic event; some kind of a community event that they feel imperative.

Or we actually have a program through a company called Good World that where we let the employees decide from a million and a half different non-profits. You basically put the money in account and it's almost like a debit card, and they get to spend it to be one, it could be 10, could be 20 different non-profits. Could be a dollar or 50 cents, whatever they're sending; however the money gets spent. And so that's some of the things that we do from just engagement. It's really pretty important.

So if I were to ask you, and it sounds to me like, one of your major expenses sounds like it's constantly, code related in keeping yourself at the forefront of technology. Would that be correct? Or other than belly buttons? Because we all know belly buttons are an expense, but is that one that really pops?

Rich: Is probably going to be professional salaries. I mean what we've done, I wouldn't say this is for everybody, but what we've done is we've had to hire a lot of specialists and we don't have a lot of redundancy. There's not a lot of bench depth, if you will. So like the team doesn't function if somebody is not here. It really takes everybody pulling away, doing their job. Part of the reason why we have come up with like this personal time off policy that we run and the way we do that kind of stuff, but at the same time, you've gotta get very specialized.

You got to have an expert on spine, an expert on knee and hip implants, an expert on biologics, somebody who knows how to write the codes, somebody who's a data scientist who can connect the dots and mm-hmm. , we have sales people, we have somebody to manage them. So, like I said, we don't have a lot of depth in that, so to attract the right people, Pay them probably more than they can make elsewhere.

Maybe it's a fair wage, but give them some kind of growth trajectory. Promote them and recognize that when it happens, reward them both financially and also professionally in other ways. That's probably our biggest expense right now. Surprisingly, our dev stack is actually very economical. Running this on a platform as a service has allowed us to kind of turn the volume up and scale it if we need to and turn it back when we need to.

So that's been really nice. But yeah, I think we're getting to the point now. We're starting to complex things like we're integrating with Oracle or we're integrating with Epic or Cerner. Some of the things you would find in healthcare, And those custom development projects have the opportunity to really spin up the cost because there's a lot of initial R and D that has to happen.

But at the same time, I think there's an opportunity because we're really the only ones doing it in our category. If we can build a business there, then we've got

captive users who are all using Epic or all using Oracle. If we've built the one plugin that works, now we have something new to bring alongside that maybe isn't as threatening as an initial conversation you and I were talking about.

So really trying to invest in that and see where that all might go. But yes, people, but far and away number one.

Marc Freedman: One of my last questions what is the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Rich Palarea: Hmm. I still struggle with this. Okay, let's just be clear about that. So I'm a work in progress, but best piece of advice I've ever been given is if you wanna go fast, go alone. If you wanna go further, go as a team. And my makeup and my personality and just my comfort level is, which is odd as a leader, right? Not really so much a man of the people, but I'll be cordial, I'll say hi to everybody and I'll get in my office and shut my door and get very mission driven. Like I said, I can spend a whole day stuck in a spreadsheet, but if I'm solving the problem, I feel like I'm getting a lot done.

I can move very quickly at my own pace that's comfortable for me, and I forget there's a whole team of people that need to come along. And so rather than leave a whole wake of disaster, that somebody really good has to come along and fix, is trying to have a self-awareness that not everybody is comfortable moving at that pace.

And sometimes people are trying to keep up, and keep up, and you'll burn people out. And so don't expect everybody to move at the pace you move, but have a self-awareness so that you can all go together. And if you do that- I have to be comfortable moving at that pace. I'm the one who has to change. I have to tailor my own sensibility to what the organization needs, and we all accomplish more as a team.

And so yeah, that's, I think it's, everybody talks about there's no I in team and all those different euphemisms, but while those things are true, They're so trite, they're hard to keep in front of us as leaders and embrace because we're just task oriented. Especially as men too. The females on our team really get this understanding.

They wanna be part of a team. The independence of a man to be task oriented and wanted to conquer stuff and get it done, it's a pitfall, right? And it happens in our marriages, it happens with our daughters. It happens at work. So I think like that's been a really tough piece of advice, but it always comes back to be true every single time I've tested it. It is true and I think it's a good piece of advice.

Marc: Yeah. Cool. So, this has been great. Where can our listeners go to learn more about you or getting contact, if you like, and we'll of course put this in the show notes so people have great access.

Rich: Sure. I appreciate that, Marc. So that the best place to go is gonna be kermitppi.com. kermit.ppi.com. The PPI stands for physician preference items. It's curious, when you think about those three words together, who has a preference? The physician? Well then why is there a preference and how that kind of created the situation we're in today and what we fix?

So, the neatest thing about the website, although we've got a blog up there, lots of really informative articles, some kind of scathing expose on how this stuff works in the industry is there's a little explainer video at the very front page that you can play. It's only about two minutes long and it really makes this idea so simple, you get to a point where you say, why wouldn't everybody want to do this? And so if somebody sees the video and feels like they want to connect us to a hospital that needs the message, we would love that. The other place we spend a whole lot of time is on LinkedIn.

We have both the company page and almost every single employee is very active on LinkedIn posting their ideas, thought leadership. We post small quick videos where you can learn about this paper-based process and why does it exist and how do we solve it, and all of that. And then also lots of other podcast appearances and that kind of stuff is up on our website too.

But we're actually thinking about launching a new channel to get into the business that you all are in. We'd love to share some of the information that we have through podcasting. And so we're thinking about starting a podcast on our own and who are the interesting guests that could come on and kind of demystify or help demystify this category so that more people can hear and know about it.

And so we don't have the reaction that I had when I heard that an implant rep stands in the operating room with a surgeon. I'm thinking my mom had her hip done last week and one of you guys was in the OR. And like, everybody should hear about this and we should have a way to manage medical device recalls that makes sense. And we should have a way to manage the spend and shouldn't every patient have some insight into what this is gonna cost before they go in for the surgery? These are all really important things we talk about. We wanna show that information. So those are probably the two ways: our website and then LinkedIn. Follow us there and interact with us.

Marc: Great. So, we'll, like I said, we'll get that in the show notes. What you're doing obviously is right, it's part of our matrix and we're made up of as well, but, Richard, I wanna thank you. I wanna thank you for your insights. A lot of great insights in this interview. Can't wait for it to come up and be posted on the podcast and this is things that people really need to know about. So thank you.

Rich: Super. I'm glad you gave me an opportunity to come on. I really appreciate it, Marc.