From Dorm Room to Disrupting Healthcare: Luka Yancopoulos' Journey

[00:00:01] Welcome to the Chalk Talk Gym Podcast, where we explore insights into healthcare that help uncover new opportunities for growth and success. I'm your host, Jim Jordan.

[00:00:21] Welcome to this episode of Chalk Talk Gym. Today's guest is Luka Yancopoulos, and he's the founder and CEO of Grapevine. He has an inspiring story that began during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

[00:00:34] While finishing his degree in renewable energy and bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, he responded to the supply chain failures in the healthcare system by stepping in to help.

[00:00:45] What started as a dorm room project connecting frontline workers with medical supplies turned to a business that generated $10 million in sales to companies like McKess.

[00:00:55] After finishing his degree, Luka took his entrepreneurial spirit to the next level by founding Grapevine.

[00:01:01] It's a groundbreaking e-procurement platform that helps healthcare providers save time and money on patient care.

[00:01:08] In this episode, we'll explore how Luka built the company from the ground up, the lessons that he's learned from the pandemic,

[00:01:14] and how Grapevine is going to reshape the healthcare supply industry in the future.

[00:01:20] So Luka, tell me in the audience a little bit more about yourself.

[00:01:23] Luka Yancopoulos, my name is Luka Yancopoulos. As far as background, I'm from New York, New York, and I am a firm believer that as people, we share a moral obligation to make healthcare more affordable and accessible.

[00:01:40] And that belief is something that defines a lot of what I do and who I am.

[00:01:45] And it's built on a foundation of my parents raising me the way they did.

[00:01:49] They are both clinical providers in different ways. My dad's a medical researcher and medical doctor.

[00:01:55] My mom is a nurse practitioner.

[00:01:57] I got involved in healthcare supply chains as a response to the fears I had for my loved one's wellbeing when the pandemic outbroke and supply chains started failing.

[00:02:08] And it was a world of problems that I hadn't imagined.

[00:02:11] I was still at University of Pennsylvania finishing up a degree in renewable energy and biomedical engineering,

[00:02:18] but made the pivot to try to make some solutions for my mom, my dad, and other frontline heroes that were struggling at that time.

[00:02:26] So tell us about your learning process, because that's not something they teach you in business school, healthcare supply chain.

[00:02:33] Obviously, your parents give you an insight into the challenges, but how did you educate yourself to be able to create a business?

[00:02:40] We should tell the audience, you have your own startup. It's called...

[00:02:42] Grapevine. I'm the CEO and founder of Grapevine, but I didn't start out that way.

[00:02:48] And when we had our foray into healthcare supply chains, I didn't even imagine making a company or a business out of it.

[00:02:55] I'll start with the horror stories we're hearing. My mom is a nurse. She's in an orthopedic surgery center.

[00:03:01] And she was telling us her firsthand horror stories of not having surgical gowns.

[00:03:06] And one of the surgeons actually popping a hole in a garbage bag to wear it over his clothes to perform a life-saving operation in real time,

[00:03:13] because these supply chain failures.

[00:03:15] Then you flip on the news, you see things about price gouging, supply chain failure and shortage.

[00:03:21] And here firsthand from my dad's research lab that works on treatment plans and ultimately came up with a treatment for COVID.

[00:03:27] I learned that they're shutting down departments of their research centers because they don't have PPE to protect themselves and continue forward handling different experiments and whatnot.

[00:03:37] Our response was try to get supplies to the frontline workers that needed it.

[00:03:41] And the way that we went about it from our dorm room was looking at U.S. import records and cross-referencing the importers of supplies with the FDA medical device database.

[00:03:51] So seeing what products were being imported and of those imports, what overlapped or was FDA sort of compliant.

[00:03:59] And we found a bunch of hits of basically sources of supplies in the United States that were hot and ready with the supplies that were missing in hand.

[00:04:08] And all we did is we connected those sources, those importers directly to the frontline workers that we knew.

[00:04:14] And they ended up transacting on their own.

[00:04:17] We provided our good service.

[00:04:18] They were able to get the supplies they needed.

[00:04:21] And we thought that was the end of things.

[00:04:23] But a few weeks later, we end up getting a call from someone who works with McKesson and has worked with McKesson for 20 years and heard that we were servicing their customers and wanted to issue us a PO.

[00:04:36] We didn't even know what a PO was at the time, a PO for something like 1.3 million three-ply masks.

[00:04:42] So we end up making a custom brand of masks for McKesson and redoing the packaging for them and selling close to $10 million of supplies through to McKesson who redistributed them to the end users that we were bridging the gap for in the meantime.

[00:04:57] And that was our first sort of business was being a drop shipping reseller powered by data.

[00:05:02] And once things stabilized and renormalized and we made our way out of a pandemic and these supply chain shortages, the service that we were providing McKesson became less and less important.

[00:05:12] Their normal supply chains came back to life.

[00:05:14] And we were thrown to the wayside and it was fine.

[00:05:17] We wanted to go back to school and finish our degrees anyway.

[00:05:20] So we did just that.

[00:05:21] We were left scratching our heads about how a couple of college kids were able to sell $10 million of supplies to McKesson and other $10 million of supplies to various other resellers and medical suppliers.

[00:05:32] When we had little or no experience and it made us uncomfortable and think that there must be a better way of restructuring these sort of supply chains in a network type of format to cut costs for medical providers and to help get some sort of backwater defense or supply chain resilience augmentation.

[00:05:50] So we went to the whiteboard and drew out a new high level model called the grapevine and launched that 18 months ago.

[00:05:56] Now, as we were talking ahead of time, it was a point in time when I ran that group in McKesson.

[00:06:00] So I have to ask the question, why didn't they have backup plans?

[00:06:05] Why couldn't they find the people that you found?

[00:06:08] I think that when there's not a and this is speculation and you might have a better idea than me, but I think that historically the fluctuations in demand as specific supplies are

[00:06:18] seasonal and they don't grow by 10,000% overnight as they did with COVID.

[00:06:23] They hadn't really experienced anything like a surge in demand in the way that we had it combined with a massive shortage of raw materials from the manufacturers that they relied on.

[00:06:33] I love that explanation.

[00:06:35] So to me, if I'm converting this as to what the answer would be to me, that they always plan on having fluctuations in their supply chain by maybe double digits at best.

[00:06:45] Yeah.

[00:06:46] So now that the healthcare system has settled back to the new norm, how does your organization fit within the continuum of healthcare supply chain?

[00:06:55] Yeah, sure.

[00:06:56] So today, grapevine is very different than what we've been talking about.

[00:07:01] It's a e-procurement software that creates time for doctors while cutting the costs of patient care.

[00:07:07] And we don't think of it as just a solution for healthcare businesses.

[00:07:11] I consider it a solution for everyone because at some point in our lives, we all become patients and we've all seen a medical bill that we're shocked by or worried about that our mission is to empower doctors and nurses to provide a higher quality of patient care.

[00:07:24] That's what they do.

[00:07:25] That's what they are trained to do.

[00:07:27] They shouldn't need to think about supply chains.

[00:07:29] And I see a future with grapevine involved where no one at a medical practice is shopping supplies and placing orders.

[00:07:37] I think we're a decade away from that.

[00:07:39] We started and where we're at today is restructuring supply chains to fit a network like structure.

[00:07:44] So how our platform works is it's free to use.

[00:07:48] We don't think it should cost money to save money.

[00:07:50] We win when a medical practice wins, but a customer will sign up for free to use grapevine.

[00:07:55] A medical practice and office manager will sign up for grapevine and they'll click a little button in the top right corner that says link suppliers and they can link McKesson, Henry Shine, Medline, any of the suppliers they already know and trust.

[00:08:08] And we will read in the data related to the offerings, the contracted prices they've established each of their existing suppliers and they continue shopping basically for major distributors now all on one screen.

[00:08:21] And that's when their experience begins.

[00:08:23] But as they shop based on habits, they shop out of convenience usually with one major distributor.

[00:08:28] When they use grapevine and they add an item to cart, let's say like a BD item Beck and Dickinson or B Bronte, one of these sort of big brands will check all of the other sources with whom they already work.

[00:08:38] And see if that product that same exact skew is available at a cheaper price.

[00:08:41] And at the moment they click add to cart, we're rearranging their cart to send those orders out to the best source.

[00:08:47] And it feels like a simple sort of Amazon style shopping experience, but it's filled with only your contracted suppliers and your rates.

[00:08:55] And it not only helps unbelievably the same products are being offered by, let's just say, Medline versus Henry Shine at half the price, which is mind boggling to me when there's the same GPOs in place.

[00:09:07] But everyone's got different costs and different sort of specialties.

[00:09:10] But also it gives you backorder resilience, right?

[00:09:12] If you typically buy from McKesson and that products out of local backorder or out of stock in your local warehouse, we're able to redirect that order to one of the other suppliers who maybe has a worse price, but they have it in stock.

[00:09:24] They can get it to you in time for your surgery.

[00:09:27] And it's a response to not only the lessons we've learned from COVID, but also the consistent sort of failures and issues that we saw pre pandemic and continue to see post pandemic.

[00:09:37] How do you calibrate the SKUs?

[00:09:40] So maybe just for the audience, generally, a manufacturer will sell directly to a hospital for big, big items.

[00:09:47] A lot of the orthopedic items go direct.

[00:09:49] And if not, they go through distributors.

[00:09:51] And if you're going into a physician office, you want to tend to use a distributor because it doesn't make sense to walk into this office building and drive 30 miles when there's only one orthopedic person in the building.

[00:10:02] Right. So someone like McKesson or Cardinal or Owens and Minor, they can send in someone and have supplies for everyone in the building and it becomes efficient.

[00:10:10] But there's also a need for if there's a recall, you have to have that traceability.

[00:10:15] So if I sell product day direct to a hospital, then it's product day.

[00:10:19] But product day might go through all the distributors and they'll put their stocking numbers on it so that if there is a recall, manufacturer calls distributor, distributor pulls it back from their customers.

[00:10:30] So one of the challenges in prices has always been that it's easy if we're just dealing with product day.

[00:10:36] But when product day has six or seven different labels by different people for regulatory reasons, I lose optics.

[00:10:42] So is part of what your company does through that?

[00:10:46] Yeah. So you bring up an interesting problem that we haven't yet seen where there might be a recall from five different suppliers and I might have that product in my supply cabinet at a medical practice, having come from five different sources.

[00:10:58] So now I need to figure out how to ship it back to the five different sources all at once.

[00:11:01] We have that incidences of recall.

[00:11:03] What ends up happening is you're not with Grapevine, you're not switching out the source or the supplier, the distributor.

[00:11:09] Usually things settle into grooves like big distributors tend to dominate at certain product categories and different product areas.

[00:11:15] So if there's a recall on needles, most of their needle spend may be with one distributor and we've been able to handle that.

[00:11:22] They work directly with the sales rep at McKesson or Henry Schein to get those items picked up, send it back and get reimbursed.

[00:11:29] It's an interesting concept, though, about sort of firing back and returning all the items that might have come from different suppliers all at once.

[00:11:37] And it's something that we've yet to experience at scale. But it's an interesting point.

[00:11:41] So the other issue is these companies generally go negotiate huge contracts.

[00:11:45] So yeah, you walk into a hospital system and negotiate literally a hundred million dollar contract with 150,000 SKUs.

[00:11:54] The contract talks about compliance. I'll give you this bundle of pricing because I'm going to get a hundred million dollars of business.

[00:12:00] So if you deviate from it, there's generally penalties.

[00:12:03] So if I move 20 million of it to another distributor, then you've violated our agreement and I get to upcharge you.

[00:12:09] How do you manage that issue?

[00:12:11] Yeah, that's something that we warn our customers away.

[00:12:15] So in your experience, Jim, and you got, I think, some experience in those contracts,

[00:12:19] what sort of savings are we talking about by negotiating and committing to the set volume?

[00:12:24] Is it like 10 percent, 20 percent discounted prices by buying at scale and guaranteeing a volume?

[00:12:29] I'd answer it this way. When these contracts come up for renewal, there's typically a competitive bidding process between multiple distributors.

[00:12:37] And so the customer purchasing agent, the hospital purchasing agent would evaluate the products in two ways.

[00:12:42] First, they look at what they pay for each individual stocking unit.

[00:12:46] And second, they look at the total cost of the entire bundle.

[00:12:50] And as you pointed out earlier, distributors have different stocking unit pricings because they are stronger in some areas.

[00:12:55] And so as a distributor, I go through each individual stocking unit, reviewing both my acquisition cost and my retail pricing.

[00:13:02] So, for example, I might buy a product at the dollar that typically I sell it for two.

[00:13:07] But in this case, I might discount it by 20 percent, making 80 cents for this particular SKU.

[00:13:14] And what I do is I go through every single SKU that I have.

[00:13:18] And as I mentioned earlier, sometimes it's like 100,000 stocking units for a hospital.

[00:13:22] And I look at the total profit of the contract can generate at the end of all that process.

[00:13:27] And if I need another discount to stay competitive, I might provide a discount from the total profit, which would appear to the customer as a volume discount that you pointed out.

[00:13:36] However, the real problem is that as a distributor, if the agreed upon contract volume isn't met, it's not dissimilar to going into a car dealership and negotiating a discount to buy 10 cars and then only showing up and buying one.

[00:13:50] So how do you help your distributor partners manage this situation?

[00:13:54] Yeah. So the state of the union with these existing contracts and what we've seen in our 150 medical practice that we work with is they'll say, hey, here's the amount of spend that we spent last year.

[00:14:05] Let's call it $10 million on MedSurg products.

[00:14:07] And we're going to basically allocate all of that spend to you, distributor McKesson.

[00:14:12] And by doing so, let's get a cost plus model in place where here's the GPO enlisted prices and you guys are going to mark them up a set amount as your profit to take home.

[00:14:24] Now, what Grapevine advises is rather than dedicating $10 million of spend to McKesson, we break that down into components and negotiate on behalf of the customer directly with multiple distributors.

[00:14:35] The difference in cost plus sort of modeling by the distributors doesn't change that much between $1 million to spend and $10 million to spend or $2 million to spend and $10 million to spend.

[00:14:46] It's usually with orders of magnitude.

[00:14:48] Slice the pie in a way that says, hey, we're going to have a pie that's half the size next year and we're going to give small slices of it to each of the distributors in the format of the contract based on our predictive analytics and seeing what percentage of your spend should be redirected to these different fronts to these different suppliers.

[00:15:05] So what once was a single contract with McKesson for $10 million to spend will get broken into, let's say, three contracts with Medline, Shine and McKesson each for $1.5 million where we can constantly let in like a free market mindset, let these suppliers compete for your attention.

[00:15:22] And we know, you know, how to slice that pie based on our predictive analytics and models that we've built in house.

[00:15:27] And it's good enough that if we're conservative with the contractual commitment, we're able to make sure that the customers are hitting their sort of minimum spends.

[00:15:35] And they're usually exceeding that spend with each of the suppliers, but we're able to generate about 60% consistently for any medical practice by creating the sort of free market for distributors and manufacturers to compete for the spend of a medical practice.

[00:15:48] It's interesting, especially in light of our earlier discussion on why SKU numbers are necessarily different for recall reasons.

[00:15:56] But for distributors, the challenge has always been that varying SKU numbers make it difficult to directly compare pricing between competitors.

[00:16:04] And this creates both an opportunity and a challenge.

[00:16:06] So the opportunity for distributors is that they can price similar unlisted SKUs at a higher margin without the customer really noticing.

[00:16:15] Now, on the other hand, the challenge is that it's harder to get a clear picture of SKU level pricing during the competitive bidding process against another competitor.

[00:16:25] So to give an example of the challenge of this situation for both the competitor and the distributor, here's a real life scenario.

[00:16:31] So we kept losing to a specific distributor, even though we knew our purchase volume from the manufacturers was significantly higher than theirs.

[00:16:40] And given our larger volume, you would expect that our discount potential to the customer would be much larger.

[00:16:46] So, you know, why were they winning?

[00:16:49] So we hired a team to manually compare every single SKU, translating their SKUs into our SKUs for analysis.

[00:16:57] And what we found was surprising.

[00:16:59] They were bidding some items at prices that we believed were below what they could actually even buy the product from the manufacturer.

[00:17:06] So what was going on?

[00:17:08] Well, it turned out what they were doing is they were systemically backordering items and substituting with higher margin products.

[00:17:16] In the end, they likely made more profit on that contract than we could have made.

[00:17:20] And eventually, of course, Sigrid caught up with them and they were exposed because they went too extreme.

[00:17:25] This lack of transparency is challenging for both the distributor and the customer.

[00:17:29] So can your system help manage this issue?

[00:17:32] The way that our system works from a data structure perspective and a data organization perspective is we have a single product for each manufacturer SKU out there in the country.

[00:17:41] So our database contains one product for this BD needle and different suppliers with different stocking units point to that product.

[00:17:50] So for McKesson, it might come in each, a pack and a box.

[00:17:54] But for Henry Schein, it might come in a our system maps.

[00:17:57] Henry Schein's each is McKesson's piece.

[00:17:59] And this is how these arrays sort of fit up against each other for each flyer.

[00:18:03] But they all actually point to the same product.

[00:18:05] And similar to the way that it sounds like McKesson did this cross-referencing experiment and database.

[00:18:10] We know what this manufacturer SKU is as an item number in any of the distributor systems.

[00:18:17] And we know what the different stocking units are available within each of those distributor systems.

[00:18:21] And it is on a per contract basis.

[00:18:23] For some cases, like I know Medline specifically, who we've been working a lot with lately, they'll have two or three stocking units on the same manufacturer item number for one customer.

[00:18:32] And then they'll only have one stocking unit for the next customer.

[00:18:35] So they'll sell it by only the case for this customer.

[00:18:37] And that's where the contract comes in.

[00:18:38] But we're able to associate that and the contract that's in place, the stocking units available to each customer, the suppliers available to each customer.

[00:18:46] We layer that all in on a per customer basis.

[00:18:48] So customers see exactly what they've contractually committed to while they shop in grapevine.

[00:18:52] So I'm curious about how your organization helps tackle the issue of counterfeit products.

[00:18:58] And just a little clarity for the audience.

[00:19:00] You know, unlike drug and medical device companies who often sell directly and have higher margin products,

[00:19:05] we're talking about products here that don't carry high margins.

[00:19:09] So if you're holding them in inventory, you're actually losing profit.

[00:19:14] And I guess the best way to explain it to people is kind of like a grocery store, right?

[00:19:17] Grocery stores don't make a lot of money on how much they profit off, say, butter, but rather how quickly they can sell the butter or turn the inventory.

[00:19:27] And for companies like this, those turns are key.

[00:19:31] So now let's say you've got $200,000,000 worth of an extra product sitting in inventory.

[00:19:36] It's perfectly legitimate for distributor company A like Owens and Miner or McKesson to call each other and say,

[00:19:43] hey, would you buy this at a discount?

[00:19:45] And they'd rather sell it at a discount and get it off their books.

[00:19:48] Now, we talked earlier about full traceability, and those are two high quality companies that keep great documentation.

[00:19:56] So we all feel comfortable with that.

[00:19:58] But then there's a second group underneath that, and they're pretty legitimate too.

[00:20:02] And again, we felt good working with them.

[00:20:04] But by the time you get down to the second or third tier where things are starting to get a little dicey, right?

[00:20:10] It's really hard to ensure traceability with these lower level companies.

[00:20:14] And so I noticed your company's tagline mentioned vetted manufacturers.

[00:20:18] And I'd love to hear more about that on how you're addressing the issue of counterfeit products.

[00:20:23] It seems like your company is really helping solve this problem.

[00:20:26] I think it's pretty interesting.

[00:20:28] And I do want to just be clear and taking a step back.

[00:20:30] Most of our medical practices, our customers are using Grapevine to work with pre-existing supply or distributor relations, right?

[00:20:38] And just consolidating it, optimizing it, and we're acting as basically a traffic cop between the partners they already trust.

[00:20:45] With that said, we also do have a marketplace that fits alongside that product offering.

[00:20:51] It's less utilized, and it's still coming to light.

[00:20:54] But we populate that marketplace with opportunities to go directly to manufacturers.

[00:21:00] Bypassing the middleman and his markup where there's an opportunity to work directly with a manufacturer and get a better price because you're making things more efficient.

[00:21:09] You're deleting stopgaps in between.

[00:21:11] The way that we populate that marketplace with vetted manufacturers is through data analysis.

[00:21:19] And it's some of the same tools that we really got our foundation in, right?

[00:21:22] We rely on the data fidelity of the FDA combined with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to provide us with the insights that, hey, these products from either this U.S.-based manufacturer are licensed and equipped for use in a medical setting.

[00:21:37] And our system, when we're onboarding marketplace suppliers, we're not going to let any product come into that marketplace unless it is established in the FDA medical device database as licensed.

[00:21:47] When it comes to the imported products, we're checking the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

[00:21:52] They're documenting who shipped the product, who manufactured the product, what port it comes into, and who now has possession of the product.

[00:22:00] If we're going to populate our marketplace with an importer, they need to check a different set of boxes, including the person who had exported it from China or India or wherever is in the medical device database.

[00:22:11] Customs documented that in the bill of lading.

[00:22:13] And we read all that information in to say, yeah, this is a vetted importer.

[00:22:17] We're not going to buy this from some random Joe that's signing up for Great Buy and claiming to have it who could have gotten knockoff counterfeit versions of these products.

[00:22:24] But we're counting on the data fidelity coming from our own government databases that are publicly accessible.

[00:22:29] I don't think people realize how much work goes into that one function.

[00:22:33] So I told you I risk nerding out.

[00:22:35] So why don't we go back to your what year three, four and two?

[00:22:40] I guess the first business sort of ran from spring 2020 to spring 2022 when we graduated.

[00:22:46] Then we got some venture funding around our graduation time and won some big grants and prizes and launched Great Buy in spring 2020.

[00:22:56] And when I say launched Great Buy, we were working on it sort of full force and had resources to be able to build the things we wanted to build.

[00:23:01] But we didn't launch our actual software product until, I don't know, nine months later, 18 months ago is when we actually launched the platform to the public for use at medical practices.

[00:23:12] What challenges are your organization facing today as you think about the future of health care and anything shifting in your business model or you're watching out for?

[00:23:21] Since launching, there were a lot of shifts.

[00:23:24] In the last 18 months, we pivoted from a marketplace.

[00:23:26] Let's introduce medical practices directly to the source, the importers and the manufacturers of the products.

[00:23:32] That was the only product that we launched 18 months ago.

[00:23:34] We realized that people have relationships with their sales reps.

[00:23:38] They respect four of their distributors.

[00:23:39] Distributors have better ship out times.

[00:23:42] They have all sorts of services that the manufacturers or importers might not have that customers value.

[00:23:46] So you can't just bring someone into a future that you imagine because it's more on paper efficient.

[00:23:52] You got to understand the human touch and meet the customer where they're at, preserve the parts of their life that they like and advance them into tomorrow by also honoring the legacy of what they've created.

[00:24:03] So that was a big pivot for us.

[00:24:05] We went away from just a marketplace model of vetted manufacturers and towards an e-procurement system where we primarily plug into the suppliers that you already work with and put nitrous into the tank of the sales reps.

[00:24:16] And distributors that you've already got to lower your price there.

[00:24:19] And there isn't a user on grapevine that goes into the marketplace first, which was the product we launched first.

[00:24:25] They start with e-procurement.

[00:24:26] They start with their existing relationships.

[00:24:27] And we slowly introduce opportunities to disintermediate and one click unlock suppliers or manufacturers as they progress through their journey.

[00:24:36] And that was a challenge.

[00:24:38] The first six months, we flopped hard.

[00:24:40] We had customers come and customers left.

[00:24:42] And that was our story.

[00:24:43] And by adapting, we've changed a lot.

[00:24:45] I mean, now we've got 150 medical practices using the platform.

[00:24:48] And through word of mouth marketing only, there's a wait list of another 300 practices waiting to use our platform.

[00:24:56] Because those who use it save 60%.

[00:24:58] They talk about it with their friends.

[00:25:00] And next thing, we're getting more signups.

[00:25:02] And we're working on it.

[00:25:02] We just raised money.

[00:25:03] We're working on scaling to satiate the demand that's been created through that word of mouth marketing.

[00:25:09] And that's the challenge for us today is we've done something once.

[00:25:11] We can do it again.

[00:25:12] It just takes a lot of effort.

[00:25:14] We've done it 150 times again.

[00:25:16] But how do we do it more effortlessly, less resource intensively, more automatically for customers hundreds at a time?

[00:25:22] My next question is, how do you keep current on these rapid changes in ADAPT?

[00:25:28] We keep a very strong or tight pulse on our customers and their needs.

[00:25:33] And we do a lot to analyze the issues that they're facing that we're currently trying to solve and the issues that we don't yet work with, but that we want to solve in the future that are tangentially related.

[00:25:42] With a core focus on letting these clinical providers, letting these medical practices do what they're supposed to do, right?

[00:25:49] Serve patients, get better patient outcomes, practice medicine.

[00:25:53] And let's take everything and anything that's outside of the scope of their sort of unique skill set.

[00:25:58] And let's try to automate it for them.

[00:26:00] Let's try to be a service provider that they can count on that doesn't cost anything.

[00:26:03] That's a philosophy that we carry into every conversation that we have with the customers.

[00:26:08] I think it's an importance of speaking with your customer and taking every opportunity to talk with the customer and pick their brain that you can.

[00:26:14] And that's a mandate that we have here at Grapevine for every employee, myself included.

[00:26:20] If there's an opportunity to talk to a customer, I'm talking to a customer.

[00:26:23] And we take that opportunity for everyone within our company.

[00:26:26] And during the harder times when things were flopping or a new solution isn't sticking, I take it upon myself and our leadership team has to do 50 to 100 cold calls a day, talking to the existing customers, understanding why they're not adopting the solution that we thought would be a home run, a solution that should save them a ton of money or time if used correctly.

[00:26:46] What's wrong with it?

[00:26:47] How can we make it better?

[00:26:48] How can we make it something that's actually useful to use?

[00:26:50] The amount of time that our co-founders have spent on the phone with customers is ridiculous.

[00:26:54] And anytime we hit a speed bump, the answer is talk to the customer, understand their needs, meet them where they're at.

[00:27:00] I think it's interesting.

[00:27:01] Your family background probably helped you have such a deep provider focus.

[00:27:05] What do you see as the biggest opportunity or the biggest threat when you look out the next five years?

[00:27:11] I have a counterintuitive sort of objective, and this is a spin between your sort of comment and your question, but I think that the right place for grapevine to exist in the medical practice is not at all.

[00:27:24] Almost every other tech company out there is trying to, how can we get eyes on this platform on Facebook so we can put in ads so we can make more money, right?

[00:27:31] Like that is not our philosophy at all.

[00:27:33] Our philosophy is you should spend no time on supply chain, but you should have complete confidence that you're getting the best price and that you can survive disruption events and keep practicing medicine the way you need to.

[00:27:44] So a goal for us, and I think it is a growth sort of goal, is getting our platform and getting supply chains in general to manage themselves, to be able to go on autopilot, to not take dedicated resources and training and time away from business leaders,

[00:27:59] but instead put that on a tech partner that wins when you win, that you have confidence as an unbiased sort of agent in the middle and acting as a fair and good traffic cop.

[00:28:09] As far as our actual sort of numbers and growth goals and metrics we want to hit, we're trying to save the healthcare industry $100 million in 2025.

[00:28:19] 2024 year to date, we're at around $3 million of savings that we generated, and it's on about $3 million of spend that's run through this platform.

[00:28:28] Yeah, and we think that as we figure out how to scale and satiate the demand that's on the table, the savings are right and ready for us to deliver.

[00:28:37] It's time for Grapevine to deliver the fruits of its labor, and it takes a little bit more automation and scaling processes and putting the right people into the right processes without overcomplicating things.

[00:28:47] Is there anything else you'd like to share with the audience?

[00:28:49] No, I got nothing else for you, Jim.

[00:28:51] That was a pleasure.

[00:28:53] Thanks for tuning in to the Chalk Talk Gym podcast.

[00:28:57] For resources, show notes, and ways to get in touch, visit us at chalktalkgym.com.