Outsourcing: Jason Beans, Founder and CEO of Rising Medical Solutions (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How many insurance companies are there in the United States?

Jason Beans: I don’t know. There are about 150 licensed insurance companies doing workers’ compensation. But that’s only in the States. A lot of the insurance companies are forming captives or off-shores in tax havens like the Cayman Islands or Bermuda. There are lots of self-insured groups or individuals, or third-party administrators or managing general underwriters (MGUs), so I actually do not have a clean number on that.

SM: How many companies are there in the sweet spot that you serve?

JB: For workers’ compensation, we have a list of maybe 75 groups that we’re targeting right now that will make a significant dent in our revenue. There are hundreds of thousands of small ones that could use a small service. But the ones we’re talking about are $1 million plus a year in revenue.

SM: And on the medical group side, how many do you have?

JB: On the medical side, I don’t know the number off the top of my head, but it’s unlimited. We actually are trying to develop products that would allow us to treat them like a product we sell so that they can drive business to us more dramatically and save themselves headaches.

SM: So, you’re trying to move from being more of a services business or a hybrid business to become more of a product business?

JB: Yes, exactly. The services are much less scalable. If we can build our technology out for ourselves in a way that solves a problem for a very large market, that’s where we’d like to evolve more of our [offerings].

SM: [That’s where] you’d like to go. Yes, absolutely. Is there anything else you want to share that’s interesting in your story?

JB: No, I think we have covered everything in that area.

SM: My final set of questions is about what do you see on your radar? Where would you point early stage entrepreneurs right now?

JB: The good thing today – it’s very different from when we started – is that technology costs are so much cheaper. There are so many ASP models that entrepreneurs can look [to become] very large for a much lower cost than they could in the past. In the health care space, I know that many, many people have started some of the products we talked about – nurses who have gone out and become legal consultants to help people with cases or helped do return-to-work products as consultants or individually, and they start small companies. Many doctors form their own small companies.

On the technology side, just being a technology expert means nothing. What I always recommend to people is become an expert in something. Go out and work for a company for a while until you see a pain point that the market is not solving. Wherever you see pain, wherever you see something isn’t working, and it’s very obvious to you, if you fix that, someone will buy it. Just knowing how to program code doesn’t do any good. So, if you’re in health care and you work for a health care insurance company, and you see something they can’t solve, and they won’t let you do it, that may be a place for a technology person to build a product that could sell.

I spend a lot of time working with entrepreneurs, trying to teach them. I’m passionate about it. If you find something you love, then you have to put the same brain power into business as you do into actually knowing what you used to do for a job. It’s almost like having two jobs at once, whatever you’re offering and learning how to run a business, manage teams, manage cash flow, do the basics of business. There are a ton of opportunities.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Outsourcing: Jason Beans, Founder and CEO of Rising Medical Solutions
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