Bootstrapping with Services to $20M: Visiquate CEO Brian Robertson (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little more about the evolution of MedeFinance in its software format. You were starting with the $4 million to $5 million revenue base and some of those clients transferred on to the software business. What was the business model? What was the average deal size? What kind of business did it turn out to be?

Brian Robertson: We had hit a sweet spot in terms of the product-market fit through a combination of direct organic development and also a strong channel relationship with a company called the Advisory Board out of Washington D.C.

We had a nice marriage because they were focused on benchmarking and best practices, yet several solutions that they sold to providers didn’t have a lot of technology underneath it. We were the opposite. So it was a natural partnership when their clients said, “We would love for our best practices to be electronic.”

Today, we call it digital transformation. But really, they just wanted more technology instead of having guidance on a bunch of best practices. Many of the best practices were around metrics and key performance indicators and how to build report libraries.

We came together in 2003 and formed a great relationship. We decided to segment the market, so the Advisory Board was focused on hospitals five and below and we were focused on hospitals six and above. We were organically good at selling health systems including Kaiser, Tenet Healthcare, and Providence Health System.

We could support the dynamic needs of each and the Advisory Board could handle more of the middle market. Both of the parties listen to the clients attentively. We created solutions and an analytics platform. On top of that, we offered a very specific point solution from pre-service to zero balance.

That means everything that happens in the revenue cycle or metrics around running the lab and surgery suite. Everything on the business side of healthcare that could drive yield improvement, topline growth, and bottom-line effectiveness were all applicable to a module or an app. If it was a narrow solution, it was an app. The company grew. It had a 100% growth year over year. It was growing 85% a year when I left it. 

Sramana Mitra: Was that organically built or did you raise money for that company?

Brian Robertson: It was a little bit of both. A lot of the growth in the early years was through a VC. It was not a significant amount – a $15 million infusion of VC. It was combined funding between Mede and the Advisory Board. They were public companies at that time, so they could put a lot of financial power around their ideas. It was a nice formula to drive growth.

When it reached about $80 million, a deal was done with Bain Capital. From that point, the idea was to do accountable care and not just work with providers. As the lines have gotten blurry in healthcare between fee per service and all the different iterations of fee per value, that capital infusion was designed to let Mede go into multiple additional verticals and adjacencies. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping with Services to $20M: Visiquate CEO Brian Robertson
1 2 3 4 5 6 7