Meet The Disruptors: Steve Gallion of MedTrainer On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Believe in yourself. This sounds basic, but you will have good days, bad days, personal complications, investor disputes, and confrontations on all fronts. You should always believe in yourself and commit to that belief. If you are moving forward, you can always adjust the route, but all routes fail if you turn off the personal-drive engine.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Steve Gallion.
Steve is the CEO of MedTrainer, the healthcare industry’s premier partner for healthcare education, compliance management, credentialing, and accreditation. He is passionate about using technology to support healthcare organizations. With a 100% customer-inspired product, internal healthcare thought leaders, and custom curated content, MedTrainer provides essential training, compliance, and credentialing technology for healthcare-industry.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Since a young age, I have always been interested in the healthcare industry and in building companies. Much of my family was directly involved in the healthcare provider side of things, so I got to see the industry close-up. I have had a few other successful ventures to date, but where my career really found scale was here at MedTrainer. Before, I had experience working in corporate America, which taught me a great deal of humility, leadership skills, inclusivity, and how to work efficiently alongside other leaders. This experience prepared me for my last company in medical waste management, which grew rapidly and was acquired in 2013 by Stericycle.
I observed a large gap in how healthcare organizations handled regulatory compliance. With a passion for entrepreneurship, a visible problem, and an idea of how I might solve it, my co-founder and I got to work to provide training solutions. We set off by creating a plan — doing the market work to validate our market existed, mapping out the initial product MVP on paper — and then we were off to the races. Now, over seven years later, we don’t look back. It’s been an incredible journey that only continues to get better, and the possibilities of where we are headed are endless.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Disruption starts with solving problems that others may not have thought about through the same lens or angle. Working in healthcare for the past 15 years, I have seen many dysfunctional, disjointed, and disconnected solutions thrown at problems with a single-threaded approach. It became very apparent that the healthcare market was looking to accomplish multiple goals, bridge gaps, and solve departmental issues using a single solution that could be utilized to fulfill many different needs.
When we built MedTrainer, we looked at what problems existed for compliance in healthcare and found that organizations were so confused about what had to be done that they were using multiple platforms to solve problems, which was a failing approach. MedTrainer has disrupted healthcare’s traditional compliance solutions market by combining learning, compliance functions, and credentialing nativity with a single easy-to-use piece of software. In some instances, we see our system replacing 5–7 pieces of software that were previously in place. It’s simple, cost-effective, and unified data in a single platform, creating ease of access, training, and cross-product functionality. This is a big win for healthcare.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
MedTrainer started with a heavy focus on learning management. As we grew, we began to recognize market signals that the problem was much more extensive — spanning over into other compliance-related areas. We built out a section of our system to hold uploaded documents and third-party credentials, named “document and credential management,” but, in reality, it had nothing to do with the real credentialing process or credentialing product as it is today. During a sales call with our first big credentialing customer, they were touring the learning management system and asked, “Do you have anything that can help us with credentialing?” I answered in the affirmative, “Absolutely…we have an entire area just for credentialing!” After walking the customer through our product as it was, the feedback was not super positive. This was a mistake in the sense that I did not yet have an understanding of the product’s need for credentialing. It was about 2 minutes on a WebEx, which felt similar to the gif of Homer Simpson walking backward into the bushes. The good news is that the customer became a great advocate and part of our product steering committee for what is now a best-in-class true credentialing system. This experience was quite embarrassing at the time, but it is something to look back on as to how a simple mistake bore a new product line and an entirely different market.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
I have three core mentorship classes: unknown mentorship, professional mentorship, and practical mentorship. Mentorships are important, but only if you can humble yourself and look to your mentor for guidance, growth, and perspective. If you can do that, you can learn a ton. I continue to grow each day as the beneficiary of advice from these categories.
Unknown mentorship is mentorship where your learnings are based on following business leaders you respect but do not know personally. I think most of the world looks at Jeff Besos, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and those types of business moguls. My unknown mentorship group does include some of those folks but partially and more specifically, I follow folks like David Gogins, Josh James, and Tim Cook. Lessons learned from them are more philosophical and high-level.
Professional mentorship is the more traditional sense of a mentor. My mentors have come in many forms, from investors to other founders, entrepreneurs, and CEOs. I can say I have gained meaningful mentorship as a CEO. Mickey Arabelovic (founder Telescope Partners) and Jim Lacey (Zermed / Collective) both transformed how I look at high-growth SaaS companies, including how to grow into a real CEO role and think long-term strategically, and execute to plan.
Practical mentorship is one of the most important as it surrounds you with people who have real-life experience. Watching my Dad graduate from dental school at 41 years old gave me the strength I needed when I went back to get my law degree at night, graduating when I was 35. My brother-in-law and I were each other’s sounding boards for big business decisions and struggles, even though our companies were very different.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
If we can disrupt the status quo by offering more effective, affordable, and efficient products, you can drive real change at a micro and macro level. Minor changes, like increasing a business’s efficiency or lowering its expenses, can allow the business to run better, provide time back to employees, and give the company more consumable cash. They then can offer more benefits, including better pay, increased social programs, and even charitable support.
I see the disruption as negative when the purpose is self-serving to the disruptor at the expense of the end-users or the next layer affected by the disruption. Business leaders, founders, CEOs, investors, and board members must keep their eye on social impact to ensure the organizational disruption does not have unintended negative impacts while driving value and scaling their organizations.
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
- Map out what you want to do. When you lay out a plan, you are much more likely to stick to it. The plan doesn’t have to be correct, but you will figure out where it needs to adjust as you build into it.
- “A shoemaker makes shoes.” Someone from our team in Mexico taught me this saying. In Spanish, it’s “Zapatero a tus Zapatos.” It means that you should focus on what you are good at and stick to what you know. When you are building a company, focus is essential. It’s important to embrace that and not try to do something out of the ordinary.
- Don’t chase the new and shiny. I learned this lesson the hard way when I allowed new partnerships, potential customers, and even employees to convince me to push out products or services that weren’t ready for market. Sometimes the excitement of that “new” thing can consume you and pull you away from what’s important.
- Believe in yourself. This sounds basic, but you will have good days, bad days, personal complications, investor disputes, and confrontations on all fronts. You should always believe in yourself and commit to that belief. If you are moving forward, you can always adjust the route, but all routes fail if you turn off the personal-drive engine.
- You cannot do everything and most things you actually cannot do well. Building a company is like making a cake: you need the eggs, the milk, the sugar, and the flour. If you don’t have eggs, you cannot simply add more milk or sugar. You must get out there and find the eggs to make the recipe successful. This translates into one of the toughest lessons I learned as a young technology CEO. Great companies are built by great talent. Pushing for the best possible talent for the roles you need to fill will pay dividends that you cannot imagine until you have done it. Without doing this, you will be the controller of all, the master of none, and will most likely fall flat as you scale the business. Simply put, you need all aspects of talent which will be different from you, have different skill sets, and have different personalities that drive innovation. Want to go fast? Go Far? The answer lies in talent.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
As Ricky Bobby and Cal Naughton Jr. once said, “with a little ‘Shake and Bake.” Shaking things up causes disruption, and once you pave the path, the sometimes forgotten step is to bake in the results.
I intend to continue pushing our company in a direction where products not only have an interesting, initial value but also grasp onto this value and “bake” it into their overall organizational operation, driving ripples of impact throughout our end markets and their patient and residence base.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
“The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz is a crucial read for any founder, executive, or even individual contributor looking at how trial and error, innovation, scaling, and disruption lead to succeeding through failure. Not only have I read this book multiple times, but you can find it on my office shelf heavily notated. Many concepts and practices from the book are great takeaways.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“We keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious, and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” — Walt Disney.
No matter what problem you are solving or the direction you are currently facing, you will always continue to move forward. There is only one direction to take: forward, and that’s how I have lived my life. I am a big believer in surrounding myself with curious people. They are the ones who look to solve problems, innovate, and discover new things. I think Walt Disney is an excellent example of someone who was curious and innovative, and I strive daily to pave new paths with continuous curiosity.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Outside of the core business at MedTrainer, healthcare technology leaders, inclusive of myself, can provide great automation, efficiency, and cost reduction to healthcare operations. The three core pillars mentioned above have an indirect ability to provide the right diagnosis, proper safety protocols, reduction in medical errors, correct insurance coverage benefits, more expeditious payments against claims, and increased confidence in providers. This application in healthcare can provide indirect benefits to the entire human population as they seek healthcare assistance. This sounds overly ambitious, but you do not have to solve the whole problem at once. Companies like MedTrainer, its competitors, adjacent technology solutions, and consolidated services will continue to eat away at core problems generating real, quantifiable, and manageable effects that directly pass through to the patient.
How can our readers follow you online?
I limit myself on many social media platforms, but I am always happy to connect on LinkedIn. I can be found at https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevegallion/.
I love to talk to aspiring entrepreneurs and founders, so I would love to hear from you if you found any of this helpful.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Steve Gallion of MedTrainer On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
