Episode 24 // Heidi Jannenga on How Conscious Capitalism Shaped WebPT’s Culture and Success

Speaker 1: Broadcasting live from the Business Radio X Studios in Phoenix, Arizona, it’s time for Phoenix Business Radio. Spotlighting the city’s best businesses and the people who lead them.

Chris Stadler: Welcome to AZ Brandcast where we talk to all sorts of awesome people about the power of brand and how to build great brands in our remarkable state of Arizona. We’re the host Chris Stadler and …

Mike Jones: Mike Jones.

Chris Stadler: Jones. Our guest today is Heidi Jannenga. Mike, tell us about Heidi.

Mike Jones: Yeah. So I’m super excited Heidi’s on the show today. I’ve been looking forward to this for a little while.

Heidi Jannenga: Almost as excited as me.

Mike Jones: That’s awesome. A little background about Heidi, she is Dr. Heidi Jannenga. Got to make that very clear. She’s the co founder and president of WebPT, which is based here in Arizona, which is awesome. And they are the country’s leading rehab therapy EMR platform. I’ll have to get a definition of EMR later because anytime I see nice acronyms, I got to know. For enhancing patient care and fueling business growth. Since the company’s launch in 2008, Heidi has guided WebPT through exponential growth. We’ll get into that later. Today it’s the fastest growing physical therapy software in the country. It’s really cool.

Mike Jones: Prior to co founding WebPT, Heidi practices as a physical therapist for more than 15 years. And today she regularly speaks as subject matter expert and local and regional technology, entrepreneurship, and leadership events as well as really cool podcasts like AZ Brandcast, as well as national PT industry conferences. She serves on the board of a ton organizations, and the one that I was really excited about to see on the list was, of course, Conscious Capitalism Arizona.

Chris Stadler: CCAZ.

Mike Jones: Yeah. Our sponsors of the show and good friends of ours. She’s also dedicated much of her time to mentorship within WebPT through her women’s empowerment group, Propel Her, and in the broader community through her work with physical therapy students and local entrepreneurs. So great give back there. That’s awesome. And then we’ve got a ton of questions for Heidi about herself and WebPT and the story and the brand and how you guys have gotten to where you are. But first, we have a little note about our sponsor, Conscious Capitalism Arizona.

Chris Stadler: That’s right. We, as always, we have to mention our fantastic friends at Conscious Capitalism Arizona. This local association is on a mission to share with the whole world how doing business for good is just good business. This local chapter of Conscious Capitalism Incorporated hosts tons of local events and provides resources for business leaders to instill a higher purpose in their company and engage all their stakeholders. Be sure to check them out at ConsciousCapitalismAZ.com.

Mike Jones: And not only that, Chris, the Arizona chapter of Conscious Capitalism is hosting the international conference of Conscious Capitalism in April.

Chris Stadler: That’s right. Are you going, Mike?

Mike Jones: I am going. I need to buy my ticket. I just saw the post the other day on Instagram about registration is now open. So you can get your tickets. If you go to ConsciousCapitalismAZ.com, you should be able to get to registration. If not, just google it. Google Conscious Capitalism Conference, and get your tickets. It’s going to be here in Phoenix in April. It’s definitely, definitely something you need to attend. I went to the conference in Dallas this last spring, and I think just it’s a transformational event for any business. You’re going to not only unlock what is Conscious Capitalism, what does that mean, what does it mean to do good business and do good in your community through your business, but you’re going to meet a ton of like-minded individuals and companies that you probably have never really associated with Conscious Capitalism. It was a great opportunity for me to get to know a lot of brands that I knew of already and was like, “Wow. They’re already actually involved in this movement,” and it was a great opportunity to meet them, get to hear from them. They’re fantastic speakers, workshops, lots of great content, and lots of great networking opportunities.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah. I’ll be there too, and WebPT is one of the corporate sponsors. We are looking for more corporate sponsors as well. So if Conscious Capitalism aligns with sort of your values, we’d definitely love to hear from you. So on that page you mentioned, there’s definitely sponsorship availability. So it’s amazing conference. As you mentioned, it’s transformational. It’s also very educational in terms of new people who are thinking, “Oh, I’m not really sure what Conscious Capitalism is and how does this pertain to me.” The speaker line up is incredible from national speakers all the across the United States and internationally who really subscribe to the pillars and understanding, like you said, good business can lead to really great success.

Mike Jones: Yep. There’s just some really cool stories of companies here in town that have done some really cool things in their community, including like you guys with WebPT, and I think of Goodman’s Interior Structures, and many more. And I’m excited to hear more of that on a larger platform.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah. Many of us started as what’s now being termed as unconscious conscious capitalists, right? Where you didn’t really … You were doing what you thought was right and based on your own values and principles of running a business, and so when you get around these other people that think like you and understand and potentially have grown a business with those same sort of principles, it’s an amazing networking opportunity and just to be around more people that maybe you think you’re an island and a lot of people don’t think like you. There’s just this amazing group of very generous and awesome people to network with and get to know better.

Mike Jones: Yeah, and all across the country. Not just here.

Heidi Jannenga: Yup.

Mike Jones: This is the international conference. Like last year I sat next to a lady and introduced myself during a break and found out she’s from Italy. I was like, “How did you find out about this? This is awesome.” Conscious Capitalism is definitely a global movement.

Heidi Jannenga: It is a global movement. There’s chapters all over the world. I’ve been to the CEO Conference, CEO Summit that’s available every year as well, and it’s just an incredible group of people. And it is very international. So encourage more people to just start to get involved, but also, if you’re at all interested in learning more, this is the conference to go to.

Mike Jones: That’s awesome. I’m excited.

Mike Jones: Well, now that we’ve got that nice little Conscious Capital love fest through, Chris, I think we’ve got an ice breaker for all of us.

Chris Stadler: Yes, we do. So, Mike, Heidi, what is your best injury story? Talking about WebPT today. What is your best injury story? Mike.

Mike Jones: Oh, man. You’re going to make me go first. That’s good. I think mine’s a good setup for you guys.

Chris Stadler: Okay.

Mike Jones: So I apparently don’t take risks. So I don’t get injured very often.

Chris Stadler: Well, according to Heidi it’s your good DNA.

Mike Jones: Yeah. We’ll just call it that. My good DNA. So one that I know I have coming to fix is-it’s such a weird word-the word bunion is such a weird word, but my big toe is crooked. It wasn’t always crooked.

Heidi Jannenga: I’ll take away my good genes to comment because bunions are a genetic thing.

Mike Jones: Well, so I’ve tried to figure that out. So I’ve sprained that toe really badly doing something really dumb, which is I played basketball with my nephew while wearing flip flops. So when playing a nine year old in flip flops, know that they are going to want to take it to level 11. Right? And you’re going to have to follow suit because otherwise you get beat, and you don’t want to get beat by your nine year old nephew.

Chris Stadler: Not an option.

Mike Jones: So I balled out in my flip flops and just royally sprained it. And that’s when I actually noticed … Well, it was later. It was probably about a year later I noticed that it was crooked. I can actually see where like that ligament is crooked itself. So i don’t know. Maybe it’s not related. Maybe it’s like two different issues, but that’s my big with huge quotation marks around it.

Heidi Jannenga: I don’t want to get too personal. At least you don’t have to wear heels all the time. That’s usually the big issue with women having bunions is no long can you wear the narrow shoes.

Mike Jones: That just sounds terribly painful.

Heidi Jannenga: Yes, it is painful.

Mike Jones: I have enough issues with just dress shoes.

Heidi Jannenga: And I’m not sure if those two are really related. Usually bunions don’t necessarily come from an injury. It’s a genetic issue that happens over time, and you’re pretty young to be experiencing bunions. So maybe you should see a physical therapist about that or you should’ve seen one previously when you had your injury.

Mike Jones: Yeah. So we talked about genes but not smarts.

Heidi Jannenga: Maybe for you it’s just J-E-A-N-S.

Mike Jones: I do like jeans.

Chris Stadler: So, Heidi, are you ready to go or do you want me to go first and buy you some more time?

Heidi Jannenga: Oh, I’ve got plenty of injuries to pick from, but there’s one major injury for me that was really actually a pivotal part of my entire life that has helped to change my trajectory to get me where I am today. So I was a basketball athlete in college. I played at UC Davis, and my junior year …

Mike Jones: What was your position? Sorry.

Heidi Jannenga: I was a forward. So power forward.

Mike Jones: Okay. Nice.

Heidi Jannenga: I had gotten a steal going down the court and was pretty much alone. Go up for a layup and land and felt a squish in my knee. And went down, writhing around in pain. I think the layup did go in because I’m sure that’s what you’re going to ask.

Mike Jones: And won the game.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah, get carried off the sideline and they do an MRI a couple of days later and it’s inconclusive. They thought I had torn my ACL. I had some instability but they weren’t sure. So they didn’t want to do surgery. So I got sent to a physical therapist, which I had started at UC Davis pre-med and had an amazing therapist. I couldn’t put any weight on it when I first started to see her. Within four weeks, I was walking with no assisted device and running in eight weeks and actually was able to return that season and play with a brace. Continued to workout over the summer and played my senior year with no brace, no surgery.

Mike Jones: Wow.

Heidi Jannenga: So it was a pivotal change for me to have experienced physical therapy and changed my major going forward to go on to become a physical therapist from that point because of my experience with that therapist.

Mike Jones: Wow.

Chris Stadler: That’s awesome.

Mike Jones: That’s a good story.

Chris Stadler: I feel like physical therapy, I feel like the body can heal itself better than sometimes surgeons give it credit for. Not to knock on surgeons but …

Heidi Jannenga: No, I mean, part of me being a physical therapist, I’m an evangelist for therapists, and we have been a provider that has been underserved for a long period of time. Right now we are at a pivotal point in our industry with the opioid crisis because physicians have chosen the easy road or the easy button, if you will, to just hand out medication versus finding the true root of a problem, especially when it comes to musculoskeletal pain, like low back pain is the number one reason. And so physical therapists are experts in musculoskeletal injuries. More doctorate degrees now, which a lot of people don’t even know. So there are studies that are coming out now by insurance companies and whatnot that are showing that if a patient with a musculoskeletal injury would see a physical therapist within the first 60 days of injury, that they’re 75%-80% less chance of them getting opioid referral or addiction moving forward. And so we’re really pounding that drum right now even harder than ever before because of the escalation of the opioid issue.

Heidi Jannenga: But there’s also, and I will pound on surgeons. I’m happy to do that. There’s a lot of …

Chris Stadler: Go for it.

Heidi Jannenga: There’s a lot of research that’s also coming out showing that a lot of surgeries that are being done that are not necessary. Right? Especially when you think about meniscus and things like that, there’s just not a whole lot of reason to be removing tissue if, like you said, the body has the ability to heal itself. So by no means am I saying physical therapists have the answer for everything, but we are very under utilized and I hope that there will be … I mean, not hope because hope’s not a strategy. We are fighting hard with more legislation and more changes from insurance company and clinical pathways to really insert physical therapists a lot more, especially when we talk about musculoskeletal injuries. Saving a lot of money downstream in healthcare costs.

Mike Jones: Interesting.

Chris Stadler: So my story doesn’t involve physical therapy. It was a miracle physical therapy actually. So I had surgery. Surgery component. It has all. It makes everybody happy. I had surgery, physical therapy, a break up. So I punched a glass pane, and like on TV, you know you just punch it and nothing bad happens to you?

Mike Jones: Sugar shatters really well.

Chris Stadler: Something bad happened to me. So I punched a window, and I guess when I was pulling out, it severed my … And you can see it. I’m showing Heidi right now my arm. So there’s a scar. So it severed my extensor tendons. So I wasn’t able to …

Mike Jones: We’re all staring at Chris’s wrist right now.

Chris Stadler: My palms facing down, I wasn’t able to lift my fingers. So anyway …

Heidi Jannenga: Do we want to talk about why you were actually punching the glass in the first place or is that a whole nother rabbit hole we don’t need to go down to?

Chris Stadler: That’s the unveil.

Heidi Jannenga: Oh.

Chris Stadler: All right. So …

Mike Jones: The punchline.

Chris Stadler: Yeah.

Mike Jones: Literally.

Chris Stadler: Good one. Always with the puns.

Mike Jones: Yeah.

Chris Stadler: So they had to reach in and grab those tendons, which had retreated up into my arm and back into my hand, pull them together, and then suture them. So the physical therapy challenge was that the physical therapist … So two things could’ve happened. The scar tissue could have formed over the sutured tendons preventing my movement from then on, for the rest of my life, right? Or the physical therapy could have been too aggressive and then torn the sutures, broken the sutures. And so my physical therapist was really attentive to that and had to kind of balance that out because they just had someone come through who wasn’t as successful, right? So they kind of learned a little bit and they … So anyways, so now my … It’s almost full motion.

Chris Stadler: Moral of the story, don’t break up with a girl, regret it, drink beer, and then listen to Nirvana Nevermind real loud.

Mike Jones: At least not near glass windows.

Chris Stadler: Right. Keep sharp things away.

Mike Jones: Keep sharp things away or be on a movie set with sugar glass.

Chris Stadler: Yeah.

Heidi Jannenga: Well, that is an instance in which you’re very thankful for a surgeon, first of all, who’s an expert at doing that type of delicate surgery, and also, obviously, I’m sure your therapist was a certified hand specialist as well.

Chris Stadler: Yeah. She was a …

Heidi Jannenga: Intricate work.

Chris Stadler: There was a name for her.

Heidi Jannenga: CHT.

Chris Stadler: Probably. But it was like a occupational therapist, right?

Heidi Jannenga: Oh, okay. So she was an occupational therapist.

Chris Stadler: Right, yeah. She was awesome.

Heidi Jannenga: Yep. That’s great.

Mike Jones: That’s awesome.

Heidi Jannenga: All under the umbrella of what we call rehab therapy. So PT, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech language pathology as well.

Chris Stadler: Okay.

Mike Jones: So your injury, Heidi, lead you into physical therapy as a profession.

Heidi Jannenga: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mike Jones: That’s awesome. And then can you give us kind of the background? Like how did that lead to WebPT?

Heidi Jannenga: So as you mentioned in the bio, I’ve been practicing for about 15 years, and through that 15 years, I had reached a lot of the goals that I had set for myself in terms of I set out to be a sports medicine specialist. I did that. I was working with professional athletes, college athletes, high school athletes, and also had become a clinic director, overseeing three practices. So with clinic director responsibilities, I also had to look over our P&L. And anyone in healthcare understands over the years, reimbursements have steadily declined, and so that’s your top line revenue. And if you’re trying to maintain your bottom line, you sort of need to look at your expenses, and one of our biggest expenses at the time was transcription and dictation. Meaning that notes that we were sending to physicians about like your hand and how you’re progressing with your hand, we’re being send to the physician on a regular basis. So we couldn’t just hand write those because a lot of our handwriting is not very legible. And so we would dictate it and it would get sent over to the physician. And so a lot of our referring physicians had started transitioning into using some sort of digital platform to do their documentation, similar to what we have to do and sending it to insurance companies and whatnot.

Heidi Jannenga: EMR stands for electronic medical record. So I thought there had to be something out there for a physical therapist as well. When we did our research, we found that there wasn’t anything specific for therapists. There were some medical platforms that had started dabbling in our industry. But the documentation in therapy is a lot more complicated. You see a therapist. I don’t know how many visits did you see your therapist for how long?

Mike Jones: It was a lot of visits.

Heidi Jannenga: Months, right?

Mike Jones: Yeah.

Heidi Jannenga: And multiple visits a week versus what you see a doctor for normally maybe once a year, right?

Mike Jones: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t remember that guy.

Chris Stadler: Even if you have surgery, it’s like you got a couple initial visits, your surgery, and then maybe a follow up or two.

Heidi Jannenga: Exactly.

Chris Stadler: If things go well.

Heidi Jannenga: So the documentation load for a therapist is significantly different than it is for any other discipline. So trying to fit something into PT is really difficult. So when we couldn’t find anything and there was nothing web-based, and I’m sure you saw your therapist running around the clinic. We don’t sit behind desks very often. So having something that a computer that you always have to go to and a server-based system wasn’t logical or practical.

Mike Jones: Especially in 1990 I think it was.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah. Exactly. Thanks for the inter webs.

Mike Jones: Typewriter.

Heidi Jannenga: So I paired up with a technologist who was very experienced in enterprise level software and had built large scale server farms and things like that in the past. And we put our heads together to build version one, which initially was just supposed to be for my clinic. It was solving a problem that I had experienced, and within nine months, we had a documentation platform that allowed our therapists to document and we are getting positive feedback. Of course, we got the feedback in from the therapist, and then built it based on the work flow and that kind of thing. And then some of my colleagues started sniffing around, and they said, “Hey, what are you doing over there? I heard you’re saving money. We want to save money. So can we try it?” And so within another six months, we had 10 clinics up and running using our platform. And at that point, we also started charging them for this. So we knew that it was valuable enough and efficient enough for them to say, “Yep. We’re willing to pay.”

Heidi Jannenga: So we did a little market research at that point as well and we found that 80% of therapists were still documenting on pen and paper. So light bulb goes off …

Mike Jones: There’s a market.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah. There’s a market. And so in February of 2008, we decided to launch the company. And we sold five clinics that first month, and now we have just shy of 40% market share, which means about 13,000 practices using our software today. And obviously over the last 10 years, expanded into more of a platform in which we have multiple, a suite of products including revenue psycho-management services. But really that’s how the story, I guess, to where we are today.

Mike Jones: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Heidi Jannenga: This is all about brand here at this show, right?

Chris Stadler: Okay. That’s part of.

Mike Jones: Your story’s part of it.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah. Well, I think it’s interesting. So how do you created a brand? First of all, it starts with a name, right? So there’s an interesting background story on the WebPT name.

Mike Jones: Yeah. Let’s hear that.

Heidi Jannenga: So we launched the company in 2008. Back then, I mean, you probably heard of Web MD. It still exists today. But it was a lot bigger back then. It was the first sort of foray into going online and typing in what you have to find out other than talking to a doctor what’s going on. And so it was all the rage, and so we thought, again, thinking forwardly, well, maybe if we start this business and we call it WebPT, that maybe Web MD someday will want to buy WebPT. It fits under the umbrella.

Mike Jones: That’s the vision.

Heidi Jannenga: Right. And we initially had some of the similar sort of foul presses of doing education because we’ve been in sort of an underdog as an industry for a long time in getting more awareness out there about physical therapy. So obviously you don’t just say, “I want to name your company WebPT.” You’ve got to buy the URL. So we looked at the URL and it was taken by some amazing guy in Florida who had bought it like seven years prior to that and had started a little website because he was a marathon runner and had experienced pain for over a year, had gone through injections, seeing all different kinds of doctors, but did not/could not get rid of his pain and couldn’t return to marathon running. And so finally, he got to a therapist who within three to four months got him back to running and marathon running.

Mike Jones: That’s awesome.

Heidi Jannenga: So he was so indebted to this therapist and physical therapy that he wanted more people to know about the industry that he built this website. It was a couple pages. I mean, he was like a web developer or something himself. So anyway, Brad Jenning and my co founder called him up and said, “Hey, here’s my story and my girlfriend happens to be a physical therapist as well. Here’s what we’re trying to do. How much do you think … Are you willing to seel it?” Because it was about to expire. “Are you willing to sell it to us?” He’s like, “Well, how much are you willing to pay?” And Brad was like, “Well, how about $50?” The guy was like, “Well, I’ve been working on this for a while. I think it’s probably worth a little more than that.” And so they get to chatting some more. 30 minutes later they circle back to, “Well, are you willing to sell it?” He’s like, “How about $500?” We said sold. So we got that URL with seven years of Google juice, which is important.

Mike Jones: That’s serious.

Heidi Jannenga: On SEO strategy.

Chris Stadler: That’s a quality there.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah. For $500 back in 2007. And so that is the start of building a brand, right? The name is so important. And when we did our first trade show and had our booth and we were so worried, we had no sales at this point. People sauntered by and said, “Oh, WebPT’s here.” Like we had been in existence. Like the name really resonated with people. That they thought, “Oh yeah. You must have been here for years.”

Mike Jones: You felt established.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah, we felt established.

Mike Jones: That’s great. That’s validating.

Heidi Jannenga: It is. Exactly. Very, very validating.

Chris Stadler: So how did you handle with all the growth and I think, what? Two recent acquisitions. How have you handled, how have you kept true to the brand? How have you managed that?

Heidi Jannenga: Well, I mean, first we established a brand, right? Early on in establishing that based on the name and our SEO strategy and things like that, in 2010, we took our first small round of funding in from Canal Partners lead by Jim Armstrong of JDS Software. And we had not done very much marketing at that point. Even though we had already started on our hockey stick of growth at that point. And so we spent some time with Greg Head, which hopefully you guys, I’m sure you know from the …

Chris Stadler: We just had him on a couple months ago.

Heidi Jannenga: Awesome, awesome guy. And he really helped to develop a strategy not only with obviously SEO strength but also establishing ourselves as a thought leader in the space because there really wasn’t anybody doing that. So we put on free webinars. We didn’t do any radio shows or podcasts at that point. Tons of blogs. We just started flooding the market in terms of getting more WebPT information out there, not specifically selling anybody, just getting more information out there. Aggregating from sites that were just hard to navigate through like CMS, the center for medicaid and medicare services, and pulling that into our sort of brand and language and style, which was very comfortable, kind of like you guys. Easy going. And we have a voice. So we started establishing that voice back in 2009/2010.

Heidi Jannenga: So when we made these acquisitions, you have to look at well, what is their brand, how strong is that brand within the industry, and then figure out how that’s going to fit into the overall sort of vision and future of what you’re trying to accomplish. We’ve made four acquisitions over the 10 year period. Very small one initially, which just was kind of a tuck in. It was some services. It was really more around personnel that we bought that company. So they didn’t even have a brand at all. So that was like it didn’t matter, right? We pulled them in under the WebPT umbrella.

Heidi Jannenga: The second one was called Therabill, which we bought a stand alone software that basically does the billing portion of claims for running a business. So you can actually use the software yourself in your clinic. So you don’t have to have anybody else do it. You don’t outsource it. You just do it yourself. And so the Therabill name was interesting because a lot of their customers weren’t just in physical therapy. They were also in speech language pathology, even behavioral health.

Chris Stadler: Okay. A wider demographic.

Heidi Jannenga: A winder demographic that we didn’t necessarily have to put the WebPT … We didn’t want to necessarily take away from their brand.

Chris Stadler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Heidi Jannenga: And so we left Therabill name alone and just created the WebPT company. So it’s a WebPT company. Because of the farther reach into other verticals that we wanted to continue to grow.

Chris Stadler: And they live out your values though, right?

Heidi Jannenga: Oh yeah. So although the name is part of the brand, all of the personnel come under the WebPT umbrella and brand and all of that. So they definitely become part of our culture, but then the name itself stands alone.

Chris Stadler: The product.

Heidi Jannenga: Well, the product is fully integrated now with our platform as well. But just the name sort of as a product stands alone. Still lives out there.

Heidi Jannenga: And then in 2016, we bought a company called Strive Labs, which was a patient retention management platform, which they had created that vertical themselves within the PT industry. Two physical therapists, brilliant guys, Scott and Ryan who fresh out of college decided, “We’re going to teach ourselves to code and develop this product because it’s very needed.” And they saw this vision of what other industry were doing that just didn’t exist in rehab therapy or PT. So they built a great business, and we nurtured them along the way. We were friendly with them for quite a few years before they decided, “We’re at a pivotal point in our business where we’re either going to take a bunch of funding in or we’re just going to sell to a strategic,” and they ended up coming under the WebPT umbrella.

Mike Jones: What does Strive do again?

Heidi Jannenga: Strive is … They have two big things. They have a home exercise program platform, a digital home exercise program with videos and things like that, which was great for therapists, and then also it’s patient retention management. Think of CRM but specifically for patients. So you create a database where you can send out newsletters, you can send out email information, all kinds of relevant information, even when a patient is no longer a patient. So you keep in contact with that patient.

Mike Jones: Like communication hub.

Heidi Jannenga: Communication hub but also think about lead generation. Do you want to keep those patients coming back? And then within physical therapy, there’s a large drop off rate where patients don’t complete their full plan of care. They just stop coming for whatever reason. They either get better or they feel like they were getting value. But they just stop coming. So you lose that communication potential to figure out why they stopped or get them back in or whatever the case may be. Communicate with them.

Mike Jones: Or they just decide that it’s kind of a pain to come in and they don’t want to talk to the therapist because they know that they’ll get in trouble.

Heidi Jannenga: Exactly.

Mike Jones: That’s never happened to me. I’m just thinking about somebody out there that’s like that.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah. Seems to be resonating.

Chris Stadler: Right across the table from you.

Heidi Jannenga: Right.

Chris Stadler: I’m the guy that dropped off his chiropractors radar last year. But there’s other reasons for that.

Heidi Jannenga: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Stadler: Apparently my Achilles wasn’t worth the physical therapy. So I’m still limping.

Heidi Jannenga: Well, see, there you go.

Mike Jones: You don’t love your Achilles enough.

Heidi Jannenga: That is part of the point is we want patients to get the best outcomes, and usually it needs a little coaxing to keep them going when it gets tougher or it just gets harder and you’re feeling a lot better but you’re not quite 100%. And so that’s what the PRM platform allows you to do, which for us, we are B2B and we want our businesses to thrive and it means more revenue in if they complete their plans of care, which at the end of the day, it’s really about the patient getting the best outcome, but it also helps the business.

Heidi Jannenga: So that was a larger acquisition, and, again, they had established a brand for themselves. And we have kept that going. We kept that going for about a year with allowing them to keep the Strive name until we got the product fully integrated into WebPT. At that point, we have rebranded it now into WebPT Reach, which the Strive name is now going away. But all of the employees are, again, from a company standpoint, they have been fully embraced and integrated, which was really nice because their culture was very similar to ours.

Mike Jones: That’s great.

Heidi Jannenga: The largest acquisition was this past year. So we were at 300 employees at the end of 2017. We added 200 more employees in January of 2018. So that was a significant undertaking. We are already integrated from a product standpoint, not fully the way we’re now integrated over this year and still enhancing that. But from a people standpoint, that was significantly a bigger undertaking.

Mike Jones: Yeah. That’s nearly a …

Heidi Jannenga: Double in size.

Mike Jones: Double size. 100% growth in employee count.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah. We’ve learned a lot through this year because we had a similar sort of tactic into slowly changing the brand over because they had a pretty significant following in the enterprise space, larger organizations within our industry. And so we wanted to make sure that there wasn’t this affinity towards that brand. What we found is that we probably should’ve moved a little bit faster because now it’s a barrier in terms of, “Well, are you BMS or are you WebPT? Aren’t you one company?” And so I think in retrospect and even with the employees, they were itching and excited about becoming under the WebPT umbrella when we first made the acquisition and our culture and all of that. And when it still says BMS on the door, they’re still like, “Oh. What are we?” You’re in this kind of nebulous zone. And so in retrospect, I think we could’ve moved a little bit faster in terms of name change. But you can only move so fast when it comes to technology, right? So we were moving at the same pace where I think we could’ve moved faster from a people and brand name standpoint.

Chris Stadler: That’s a good lesson that …

Mike Jones: Yeah, I think sometime the temptation is to move that slower, right? And kind of leverage that equity as long as possible.

Heidi Jannenga: Yep.

Mike Jones: But in reality, that’s not always the right strategy. Yeah, there’s equity, but there’s also a dissonance that you create as you try to eek that out over time.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah.

Chris Stadler: Well, then there’s also like a lot of the employees, sometimes, some cultures, they just like the old culture. You kind of want to let things stabilize, like certain thing stabilize, but it’s almost like you …

Mike Jones: They’re excited about the new culture.

Chris Stadler: Right, right.

Mike Jones: It’s like …

Heidi Jannenga: And we implemented a lot of our cultural things, right? So when it still says another name, you’re still reminded of the old culture, right? Which, I mean, as you can imagine, infra structurally there are a lot of things that have taken a lot of time, even change over of benefits, right? It’s an annual thing. Change over of benefits. Now they’re finally just now getting changed over to WebPT benefits for 2019. They were Microsoft. We’re Google. Trying to even just … When you think about email addresses. Yes, exactly. So some of those … You just don’t think about things from a larger scale, how hard that is to even just change emails. And all the history you have in your email and all of that to just switch over is not just something you do like snapping your fingers.

Mike Jones: No. It takes time.

Heidi Jannenga: It takes times. It takes time.

Mike Jones: It does take time. But, yeah, it’s that balancing act between the infrastructure and kind of the brand.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah.

Mike Jones: And the identity.

Heidi Jannenga: Yep.

Mike Jones: And at which pace do you move each. That’s a cool story though. That’s a good one.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah. It’s been a hard year. I’ll be honest. I mean, it’s just integrating two large companies like that is not an easy task. I mean, there’s multiple tasks in the people portion of it because we are very much a people first, very focused company. Even now also because we’re no longer, which has also been a big change. We’re no longer just HQ centric. We now have eight locations across the country, and I mean all the way across the country. From Upland, California to Sacco, Maine to Minneapolis to Atlanta, Virginia, Boston, Denver.

Mike Jones: Your own little cultural differences and nuances.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah, which is okay, right? Every hub can have … Even departmentally. Yeah. You have to navigate and that’s a lot of travel, right?

Chris Stadler: Before I started Resound, I was at an agency that had just merged. It was three agencies across the U.S. and Canada that had just merged. Just those little … Not only the institutional differences between each of the three agencies but also this like U.S. versus Canada cultural thing was really funky. I mean, even after two years there, it was still like … it was awkward. I mean, just like holiday schedules were different. There’d be days you’d call up somebody in one of the Canadian offices and you’d get their voicemail. You’re like, “I thought they said they …” Then you look at the calendar and you’re like, “Oh, they have a holiday today.”

Heidi Jannenga: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Stadler: One of my favorite things about that was we would always ask them about these Canadian holidays that we didn’t have here, and there were more. That was one thing that was also awkward was they had more holidays than us, more paid holidays. And we would ask them, “What is this holiday? Tell me about it.” They’re like, “Eh. Don’t worry about it.” That was my favorite part.

Mike Jones: The fact Canadians are supposed to be super polite and like don’t worry about it.

Chris Stadler: They’re very polite.

Mike Jones: They’re very polite when they told you, “Eh, don’t worry about it.”

Chris Stadler: Yeah. He was very polite about telling me to not worry about the holiday. That he didn’t …

Mike Jones: To like shut you off.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah. Nunyon.

Chris Stadler: Yeah. He wasn’t like, just like, “I don’t want to talk about it.” It was just like, “Eh. Don’t worry about it. It’s all good.” No, they were very polite.

Mike Jones: Yeah, at Local Motors, we had people from like Germany, MEMA. Yeah.

Chris Stadler: Bigger difference.

Mike Jones: Yeah, and then there was like we were talking to somebody who works in France to join the team, and it was like, “Yeah, but we have to know about the fact that French like labor laws are super different than ours.

Heidi Jannenga: That’s kind of like now working with California.

Mike Jones: Oh yeah.

Heidi Jannenga: Very similar.

Mike Jones: Whole nother country over there.

Heidi Jannenga: Whole nother country. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously it’s now our second largest hub. So we’ve embraced it. But it’s a lot of work to understand the rules. And then as a software company, we have to be thinking about Nexus and there’s just a lot of things as you grow that you have to learn to navigate, especially through acquisition. I can’t emphasize the due diligence component, how important that is going through as fine a tooth comb as you can. It’s obviously there’s always nuances and things you uncover post acquisition, but the more you can walk through that process of asking the right questions. Every time we’ve learned new questions to ask and it’s just still not enough.

Mike Jones: Wow. Is it like things that people are trying to hide or things that people just don’t know is relevant?

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah. I think it’s more irrelevance than you just don’t think to ask that until you’ve had an issue with it previously. We have extremely savvy diligence teams, but just things that get uncovered. You’re like, “Really? We didn’t ask that?” No, we didn’t ask that.

Mike Jones: Or like the undocumented policies.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah.

Mike Jones: Stuff that’s just kind of institutionalized in and expected but it’s never really been written down. That’s always interesting.

Chris Stadler: So that kind of carries us into the next question. I’m going to steal your question, Mike.

Mike Jones: Do it.

Chris Stadler: Is that all right?

Mike Jones: Steal away.

Chris Stadler: So business philosophy is a big thing in Conscious Capitalism, right?

Heidi Jannenga: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Stadler: So how does your business philosophy impact your brand and what is Conscious Capitalism have to do with any of that?

Heidi Jannenga: Well, the good thing is through due diligence is that we ask a lot of culture questions. So we have a whole list of litany of things that we think about and talk about with the previous leadership and how they think and what their philosophies are. And so part of our acquisition conversation is around how difficult or is this, first of all, a culture, in terms of values at least, is something that matches with ours. Right? If it’s strictly shareholder value driven company that we’re purchasing, I mean, that’s going to be a lot tougher to integrate that kind of culture, at least from a leadership perspective, and do we keep those types of leaders in the organization moving forward. So there’s a lot of conversation about that, even pre-acquisition, to understand moving forward, how is that going to play out I the post acquisition strategy.

Mike Jones: It’s also a Conscious Capitalism think, right? Is like stakeholder value rather than just shareholder value, yeah?

Chris Stadler: Yeah. Nice. Yeah.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah. Absolutely. And so we are very strong Conscious Capitalists conscious company. So we also ask a lot of questions around the people component in terms of leadership and how you think about leadership, the practices that you’re doing from your HR perspective, opportunities that your folks have within your organization, that kind of thing. So there’s a lot of questions that are specifically aligned to our values and the Conscious Capitalists values. And thankfully, the companies that we have integrated into or acquired into WebPT aligned in almost every one of those categories. And so that’s the good news.

Heidi Jannenga: But there’s also a lot of understanding and education of those employees into this new culture because there is differing areas and there’s also a language that comes with our core values, comes with being a Conscious Capitalist. So the culture is one very important one, but first and foremost, the thing that we drive home is getting them galvanized around our new vision, right? Because as a previous company who had a different vision, here’s what the WebPT vision is achieving greatness in practice for our therapists and empowering our therapist to do that. So having the … We did a culture tour, which I lead, with our culture captain Dana, and we ran around to every hub. We do something we ever new employee called the culture cruise.

Chris Stadler: Okay.

Heidi Jannenga: Which is basically a three day deal where you just get an understand of everything that it is to be a WebPT-er.

Chris Stadler: To get on a cruise ship?

Heidi Jannenga: We haven’t got the captain’s hat. [inaudible 00:41:37][crosstalk 00:41:38].

Heidi Jannenga: It’s like that.

Chris Stadler: Lead by the culture captain.

Heidi Jannenga: Yes. So and you learn all about the company before you actually get to sit in the seat that you’re hired for, right? So talking about purpose, talking about culture, talking about core values, talking about Conscious Capitalism. I put the slide up there of how our business philosophy and how that works. And so we went around to every hub and did our two and a half hour, three hour, depending on the size of the hub, to really help everybody understand like this is what you got yourself into. Right? And it went over really, really well. We had rockstar t-shirts. We had all of the locations on the back, and WebPT. I should’ve worn it today.

Mike Jones: The tour shirt.

Heidi Jannenga: The tour shirt. Exactly. The culture tour. Yeah.

Chris Stadler: Does it have dates?

Heidi Jannenga: Dates and venues on the back. Exactly. The AC/DC lettering of WebPT in the front. I don’t know if we could get in trouble for that, but whatever.

Mike Jones: Don’t worry about it.

Heidi Jannenga: It was cool and everybody got a shirt.

Chris Stadler: Wait for the cease and desist.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah.

Mike Jones: Then you can have a …

Chris Stadler: Ask forgiveness. Then you put the cease and desist up there on the bulletin board. It’s bragging.

Mike Jones: You can then just bring the tour to AC/DC. And then bring them on tour.

Heidi Jannenga: Do they still on tour?

Chris Stadler: Own it.

Mike Jones: I don’t know.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah.

Mike Jones: They’re pretty close to not being on tour.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah. But it’s making sure that they understand and now there’s now sets of expectations of what it means to be a part of WebPT as a brand, as a company, and with leaderships. And so they’ve embraced it really well. That portion of it I think has gone pretty well.

Chris Stadler: I’m going to steal on the questions, Mike.

Mike Jones: No, that’s fine. You’re doing great.

Chris Stadler: So I was kind of wondering, is there a theme you see with the brands that you’re about to acquire? Is there something that stands out as kind of the thing you’re most worried about, the thing that maybe … The thing that’s likely to happen but you worry the most about. Is there something about the culture that stands out as a problem? What would make you say no?

Heidi Jannenga: Oh, saying no to a company?

Chris Stadler: Yeah.

Heidi Jannenga: Well, obviously if they are truly trying to hide something form us. If they’re not an upstanding sort of organization, that would be a big red flag.

Chris Stadler: What would that look like?

Heidi Jannenga: I don’t know. If they were committing fraud in some way, that they thought they weren’t or they were just trying to pass as mainstream. Like for us in healthcare, there’s a lot of sort of Medicare fraud, billing fraud, things like that. So if we uncovered any of that, that would be a big red flag. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s also about the risk to the business. You’re got to do your diligence as best as you can because once that acquisition goes through, any issues that that previous company has now becomes your problem. Right? So from a people perspective, I think it’s not necessarily that we would say no to an organization. It’s really what leadership would we keep or not keep. Because most acquisitions that you make, you want to bring the people on board with you, especially in a large acquisition like this where you’ve got leaders that they’ve looked up to. This is a 20 year old plus company. So they’ve got people that were in place for a long period of time. There’s a lot of relationships that are there.

Heidi Jannenga: So if those leaders aren’t of the mindset that is similar to you, that’s going to be a difficult to say, “Yep. Chop, chop. See you later. Thank you for playing. We’ll take all of your people and your IP.” That’s just a more difficult way of doing it. So if your leadership is not of the similar mindset, I think that that becomes a lot more … It’s a longer process I guess. I don’t know that you would say no if it’s the right thing to do in the company. It’s just a longer process.

Mike Jones: I have a tangential question. We’ve been talking a lot about culture and how there’s this challenge of integrated new brands in an internal cultural perspective. How much does that matter externally? How much does your internal culture impact the brand from an external standpoint with customers or with audiences that you’re putting it in front of?

Heidi Jannenga: It’s everything. Our external brand is not much different than our internal brand. We publicize our core values. We talk about them. We talk about our purpose. We talk about Conscious Capitalism and practicing that both externally and internally. So I think it’s very difficult to have a different internal brand than you do external. Like that to me is … I don’t know. Disingenuous.

Chris Stadler: Sounds like a lot of work.

Mike Jones: Yeah.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah.

Mike Jones: That was the answer I was looking for.

Chris Stadler: Sorry I jumped in.

Mike Jones: It was a leading question for sure. I think that’s important for people to understand.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah, and I think you should be proud of your internal culture and people gravitate towards that. That is part of now the WebPT brand, it is our culture. We just had our 10 year anniversary this year, and we have an annual conference every year called Ascend, and we hosted it here in Phoenix this past year. And part of it was that you got to tour the WebPT campus, the HQ campus. And we had 350 people that were super excited to just take tours because a software company, even with sales, you don’t really actually get to meet real people. You do a lot of things online. So to come to see and to visualize everything that they’ve heard and we talk about and the culture and all that, we did tours for like three hours of our whole HQ. It was awesome.

Mike Jones: It makes it real.

Heidi Jannenga: It makes it real. Yeah, and you guys should come take a tour by the way.

Chris Stadler: We definitely need to do that.

Mike Jones: Sign us up.

Chris Stadler: I was wondering do your physical therapists … So your clients, right? Do you think they’re effected by your brand? Do you think your brand kind of benefits other brands as well?

Heidi Jannenga: I would love to say yes. I know that they …

Chris Stadler: Am I asking you to brag too much? Sorry.

Heidi Jannenga: No. I mean, I know for sure that when we have … We do a lot of culture talks. I do culture talks about how to develop a great culture, things that you should do, like the steps that you should take when you think about that. And I know that we have effected people in that way of taking time to write down their core values, have more open conversations with your teams and staff, have more transparency, transparencies okay, vulnerabilities okay as a leader. I think that just like any other brand, we’ve learned a lot from the Zappos of the world and others that have these amazing brands. I mean, obviously Whole Foods and Container Store and all that. I mean, they’re the ones … Starbucks, Southwest Airlines. They’re all leading the charge in exemplifying this on a much larger scale than we are. So within our niche of physical therapy, I would absolutely say yes. But I will say more importantly to me as a founder, it’s impacting our people.

Heidi Jannenga: I will hopefully not tear up right now. But we have, especially holiday parties when we invite our significant others or we have a family picnic every year in which they get to bring their kids and it’s just awesome to meet the entire person, right? So not just the employee that shows up every day. But you see the significant others. We’ve had significant others … I mean, it happen every year multiple times. That they come up to me and they’ll say, “Thank you so much for developing this company and having the culture that you have. You’ve changed my significant other/my wife/my husband. They are so much happier than they’ve ever been since I’ve known this person, and it’s impacted us at home. It’s changed our lives together, our families lives, not just because it’s a career or job that you have. It’s because of the environment you have. It’s changed their mindset.” It’s ridiculous. Sometimes I have to pinch myself. I’m getting goosebumps right now just talking about it because the impact you have as an employer has so much …

Chris Stadler: It’s very deep.

Heidi Jannenga: It’s very deep and it’s so impactful to families, and the fact that we now employ 500 people, which means we’re impacting 500 plus families. Like that’s an incredible responsibility. And we take that very seriously. Anybody who doesn’t, I don’t know what’s going on in your head. Sometimes I think people forget about that, and that’s really at the crux I think of what Conscious Capitalism really is about.

Mike Jones: Yep.

Heidi Jannenga: When you think about the people.

Mike Jones: Yep. It’s about people and the whole person.

Heidi Jannenga: And the whole person.

Mike Jones: Yep.

Chris Stadler: It’s funny. So I’ve heard the same thing about Mike’s company as well. Don’t cry, Mike.

Heidi Jannenga: It’s okay, Mike. It’s okay to be vulnerable.

Chris Stadler: Heidi, can you grab the tissues. And Adam Goodman I think said something similar in this podcast. He mentioned that he does this thing where he writes letters to families of his employees.

Heidi Jannenga: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Stadler: And then sends them home, and so they end up on their refrigerator and stuff. He was saying that it was amazing just how that improved morale. They go home and now they get to be proud of the work they did and now their wife gets to see that or their husband or whatever.

Heidi Jannenga: Adam’s such a great example of a conscious leader. He does so many amazing things with his organization and we definitely use him as an example in some of … Have probably stolen some of the things that he talks about. But that’s really why we do the family picnic. That’s why we do the holiday party, which always is plus one because of that. Right? And we recognize, we have what we call our Saasy awards, S-A-A-S-Y, awards every year, which is company awards that we give out at the holiday party, and it is so important to be recognized in front of your significant other, right? Because you go off to work and sometimes you don’t really understand what they do all day, but, like Adam says, when you’re able to share that with your family, not just come home and say, “Oh, look what I got today,” and show your award, but it’s actually including them as part of … And we always thank the significant others for allowing them to be a part of our community and to be a part of the WebPT success every day. Because, you guys know, you couldn’t do it without … I mean, everyone can obviously do it by themselves, but it’s so much more meaningful when you have more people involved.

Chris Stadler: Yep.

Mike Jones: I had one follow up question before we close out, and that was I’m just curious, where in your kind of history of WebPT did you kind of sit down and really formalize the values? Was that pretty early on or did that kind of come a little bit later?

Heidi Jannenga: So values initially in a startup are born in the founders. It’s kind of just how you do things around here when you’re a small team, and as we started the hiring process, we started early hiring for culture. But we didn’t actually define it until 2010. So when we took that first round of funding in, one of the first things we started to do was hire more people. We needed more resources. So within that next six months, we had hired more people in the company than had been in the company the previous two years. And so we felt this culture shift, and every year, at the beginning of the year, we always did kind of a mini strategic planning session. We called it a company standup where we would ask everyone, “Hey, what do we do really well last year? What do we need to improve on? What are our goals for this year?” Blah, blah, blah. So this particular year we also asked, “What do you want to be known for in this organization? What types of people do we want in here? What do we want to stand for as a company?” And we filled up a giant white board, and from those white board of those 40 people in the room, that’s what got distilled down into your core values.

Mike Jones: Very collaborative. That’s awesome.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah. And so it wasn’t a top down, “Hey, here’s our core values.” This was a collaborative effort with those 40 founding employees who were living it every day, and this is how they defined it. This is what they wanted to continue to be. So I’m super proud of that. Initial six and we added another two the following year, those still are fully part of the foundation of who we are 500 employees deep.

Mike Jones: That’s awesome.

Heidi Jannenga: So it’s scaled from 40 to 500.

Mike Jones: That’s very validating.

Heidi Jannenga: Yeah. It’s pretty cool.

Mike Jones: That’s awesome.

Heidi Jannenga: And all the leaders that we brought into the mix have gravitated and really taken those on as, “Yeah, these are amazing. We’re going to continue this culture.”

Mike Jones: That’s awesome. Well, we are out of time. Heidi, do you have anything that you want to share?

Heidi Jannenga: That was fast.

Mike Jones: I know. It goes so fast, doesn’t it? Do you have anything that you want to share in terms of things you’ve got coming up that you want to plug or want people to know about?

Heidi Jannenga: Well, I hope to see everybody at the Conscious Capitalism summit that we’ll have here in Arizona. It’s going to be at the Wild Horse Pass in April. So please take a look the website. I will also say if you liked what you heard about our WebPT brand and might be looking for a new job, we have a lot of positions open at WebPT. So if you go to WebPT.com/careers, you will find a whole list of awesome opportunities that we have not only here in Arizona but also across the United States in some of our hubs. So anybody listening that’s interested, visit that page.

Mike Jones: That’s awesome.

Chris Stadler: Right on.

Mike Jones: Check that out.

Chris Stadler: Yep. For sure.

Mike Jones: Well, Heidi, thank you so much for coming on AZ Brandcast today. I know Chris and I had a awesome time. I’ll speak for Chris right now.

Chris Stadler: Yes, yes.

Heidi Jannenga: Thank you guys so much for this opportunity. It’s awesome and congratulations on the podcast because this is a great topic.

Mike Jones: Awesome. Well, for all of our listeners, this is Mike Jones and …

Chris Stadler: Chris Stadler.

Mike Jones: For AZ Brandcast. You can check out all of our episodes including this one very soon on AZBrandcast.com and obviously you can find us all the time on iTunes, Stitcher, and all of your favorite podcast places. Be sure to rate us five stars because we are worth five stars.

Heidi Jannenga: For sure.

Mike Jones: And also it helps us rank better. So please do. Please rate us five stars on iTunes or wherever you listen, and if you want to get signed up for our newsletter and stay in touch with us, kind of here what’s going on, hear about what podcasts are coming up, be sure to check us out, AZBrandcast.com. You can scroll down to the bottom and get signed up on our newsletter there. Find us on all the usual social places, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, I think. I’m not sure. We’ll have to check on that.

Chris Stadler: I don’t think we have Instagram.

Mike Jones: What are we doing, Chris? The brand experts don’t have an Instagram account.

Chris Stadler: A lot going on, man.

Mike Jones: We’re slacking. Maybe it’s strategic.

Chris Stadler: There’s a lot of branding going on.

Mike Jones: It’s strategic. Yeah. So check us out on all those except for Instagram. Don’t do that.

Chris Stadler: Don’t waste your time.

Mike Jones: And we look forward to next month when we are having Thomas Barr from Local First Arizona come by. We’re going to be chatting with him near the end of December, right after the holidays. So he and I will have a good time while Chris is up in Portland, Oregon area.

Chris Stadler: It’s just Oregon.

Mike Jones: Oregon.

Chris Stadler: Let’s just say Oregon.

Mike Jones: Oregon.

Heidi Jannenga: Thomas has got a great conference coming up in January too.

Mike Jones: Yes, he does. We want to make sure that we got him on before that.

Heidi Jannenga: That’s awesome.

Mike Jones: Yeah. So we’re looking forward to that. So we will check all of you out later. Be sure to check out the episode when it goes live in about a week. Thanks, everybody.