CS Can't Promise Retention. Here's What It Can Promise — Ryan Randall

There's only a few big waves that happen in your lifetime of your career, and your job is really to try to catch those waves. We are living in the most automated era of customer relationships in history. We have health scores and churn prediction models and risk dashboards, and essentially the whole apparatus of modern customer success, which is really built on the premise of, if you can measure enough things, you can see what's coming. My guest today spent 15 years in healthcare SaaS building those very systems, and what he will tell you is that a CEO can essentially walk into a boardroom, cut 1,300 vendors in a single meeting, and for those vendors, half of them probably had the organization showing as green or high-performing or likely to renew on their dashboard the week before. Ryan Randall is the VP of commercial at Vital, an AI-powered patient experience platform deployed across hospital emergency departments nationwide. He's carried the retention number inside health systems, where the buyer is often a committee, the margins are razor thin, and a leadership change can essentially vaporize a contract that looked like it was performing just fine. His premise is that customer success can't really promise retention. What it can do is it can engineer the conditions that make it more likely. That's a harder thing to sell internally. It's also a more honest version of the job. This is "Scaling Trust." I'm your host, Matt Tidwell. Let's get into it.

Ryan Randall, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Glad to be here, Matt.

Hey, I'm super thrilled to get to spend some of my Friday morning with you, so thanks for making time. For folks that are new to your world, Ryan, you are the VP of commercial at a pretty incredible company called Vital in the healthcare space. Would you mind just sharing a little bit about your role as VP of commercial and maybe how you got to this point?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, first, thanks for having me and glad to be here on a Friday morning chatting with you. But yeah, so I am VP of commercial at Vital. And Vital, really what we do is help health systems improve the patient experience, and we do that through digital tools that really help guide patients and support people throughout their emergency department, hospital, or even urgent care visit. And I've spent more than a decade really in healthcare technology, working with various health systems really to improve both patient experience and achieve better operational or financial outcomes. But my background really spans customer success, strategy, analytics, growth, and I often kind of describe myself as really a translator for internal teams and external teams to really understand how do we connect the data that we have and the impact that we're having to actual decisions to be made for the betterment of the health system or for the betterment of the patients that we're serving. And so I'm really passionate about making healthcare easier for people. I've got my own stories, and I feel like everyone does. We've all had these experiences with really frustrating or challenging moments in healthcare, and that's what really is one of the things I love most about working in health tech is that there's so many people with so many unique challenges and stories that bring us all together to solve these unique problems.

The health environment and the healthcare system that we have, we've all been a customer of it, so that's the one thing, probably the one industry we could all say we've made that purchase. We've all been there.

Yeah. That and food and beverages is probably about the most relatable.

Yeah. True. We do need to eat. That is a good point.

Yeah.

Well, I love it. And when you and I first connected, as one does, I LinkedIn profiled and stalked and everything just to get a sense of everything before we met and said hello, and I thought one of the things that I might open up with is I love the positioning that you've taken within Vital as the vice president of commercial. I think we talked when we first met about customer success and post-sale operations and things like that, and we were just kind of talking about that, but the position that you've taken now, that you've taken on here within Vital as VP of commercial, I think it's a unique distinction. That's a positioning. It represents how you're bringing the org together in a way. I would love to know, you've been VPs of customer success or AVP of customer success and delivery. You've been directors of accounts. You've been on the head of client success. You've had all the different ones. What's unique about your framing and positioning of being the VP of commercial? How are you thinking about it differently now than maybe lots of other orgs in the space are thinking about VPs of success? How do you think about commercial?

Yeah, I think for me, it's about connecting different pieces of the organization together. So when I was thinking about this position, it's really about how do I bring those things together and in the best way for our clients and leverage the things that I've been able to learn from those different positions and how we've achieved success. One thing I noticed throughout my career has been oftentimes there's a lot of silos in organizations of, all right, you've got the sales team, they're handing off to implementation, and no one really knows. There may be a handoff document or one meeting to say, "Here's all the things we talked about." And then implementation takes it. They build out the tool. They hand it off to customer success, and they have one meeting to talk about it, and there's not enough context or really information to get those teams really working together as closely as possible. And so with everything rolling up under me on the commercial team now, it's about how do we work together, leverage our strengths across the organization to bring the best outcomes to the client.

Yeah, man. How are you thinking about that? I think we've all lived exactly what you just said. If anybody's had any part of their career in post-sale operations, success, enablement, implementation, whatever those titles could be, we've all had that experience of the post-sale handoff where it's like you get some Salesforce notes and, "Sweet, good luck. Here's the Zoom call. See you next week." We all get that fresh.

Yeah, start fresh.

Yeah. So I think we've all lived that. There's lots that I want to talk to you about, but I'm curious, what immediate changes are you making or have you made in that handoff process? Have you dialed that in? I'm sure you've dialed that in more. What have you started to see work? Because you guys are growing at a pretty steady clip.

Yeah.

I was looking through Crunchbase and some other things, and y'all are no joke. You're growing pretty rapidly here. So anything you've seen or learned in the recent shift in that handoff experience?

Yeah, I wouldn't say it's perfected. We're always growing and learning. The thing that I'm really focused on right now is about how do we leverage the skills that these teams have. Having worked in the sales side of things, the thing that I saw across my team on the sales side was what these guys and gals were good at was really building relationships, having conversations, right? They were awful, myself included, at taking notes and putting them into Salesforce and having that information updated and having a good context to be able to be handed off. And so it ends up being one meeting, and one document because there is no background information to be able to pull from that's reliable or scalable across the organization. And so with that in mind, same goes for my CSMs on the client success side. A lot of them are more better at documentation, but it's still the core thing that I hired them to do is build relationships, and that's where their strength is. And so when I think about how do we get the right context and make it easy and have high adoption, it's all about automation. Automate the things like meeting notes. We have meeting recordings and all that stuff, and how do we pull that data into the CRM automatically and match it to the right client, and then have insights from that data and taking the work out of the process so that they can do what I hired them to do and leverage those skills, right? So that's really what I'm focused on right now is how we build that system so that they're not copy and pasting stuff 10 times into Slack and into the CRM and into a Google document that they want to keep their notes in, making their lives easier.

Yep. Oh, I love it. It's allow the machines to do the machine stuff so we can do the human stuff. You had a really great kind of synopsis where you said, "Our job is actually to orchestrate the probability or the possibility of success, not try to predict the churn percentage."

Yeah.

And I don't know, that rings so true. Since you said that in the email, I think I've probably repeated it like 50 times. And I promised I'd give you credit for it, but I'm like, "This is like the truest thing I've heard about my career ever." What gave you that realization and what does it mean? How do you explain that to your team?

I realized it by trying to build my own health score. So just going through the process of like, all right, what are the things that actually drive decisions for health systems to renew a contract? And put together this really smart, at least I thought, health score for these accounts. And then sure enough, you see one that's green and has great scores, cancels. And you have to ask yourself, all right, what actually happened here? The other thing I noticed is on the other end of it. All right, we've got a client who is in the red. We know they're at risk, but there's nothing we can do. We've lost all of our account contacts. They've all left. No one's willing to take a meeting with us. They are in financial ruin, or the CEO has made a decision to cut 1,300 vendors from their vendor list. So there are things that are completely outside of the control of the CSM world and what they can actually do. And so I've kind of leaned towards those health scores are helpful. They're guides. They help you triage where you should focus time and attention, but they're not oracles. They're not predicting the future of what is actually going to happen, in my opinion. But they can help identify some risk as you start to, and you have limited resources, and you've got to identify where you want to focus time and effort. And so yeah, that's been kind of the philosophy that I've taken and tried to run with the team.

As you have to have metrics to report back then to the board and to everybody else that you've got to show commercial progress to and retention progress to and likelihood of renewal to and what next year's forecast looks like. I guess, how has that shifted how you re-engineer some of those KPIs or things that you look at? Do you have different signals than you had before, aside from usage data? What types of things do you think about, either product or qualitative, or are there new touch points that inform that dashboard and those executive reports you're creating now?

Yeah, I think the answer is a little bit complicated, right? The reality is the dashboards, if the board asks for a dashboard, we end up creating it because they want to see something cut a different way, and that's okay. We're happy to do that.

Yeah.

But when I think about it brass tacks of what is actually needed, I break it down to three things. Number one is are we showing value, right? Is there measurable value that can be attributed to the work that we've done for this client? Number two, do we have an internal advocate? I think I told you this last time we talked, but I steal this from Hamilton. You have to have someone in the room where it happens, right?

Mm-hmm.

The decisions get made and the sales happen now, not in the room that we're in, talking, chatting, whether it's virtual or in person. It's happening in a closed-door office with executive teams at that organization making decisions, and you have to have someone in that room who's willing to fight for you and knows your value prop. And so that's the second thing. And the third thing is budget. At the end of the day, if they don't have budget, if they're bleeding money, which a lot of these smaller health systems definitely are in the country, it's very challenging. But it's kind of that triangle, if you need all three pieces to be able to be sure that you have strength and renewal. And I think going back to the people part of having an advocate, having one is great, but that person can leave. And so having backups and being wider in the organization is another key thing for me of making sure that if we were to lose that main contact, we still have other people that we can talk to and will fight for us.

Are there any kind of unique things that you engineer into the journey to make sure that you at least have the opportunity to build those relationships?

Yeah, it's interesting. I think conferences have been a bit of an epiphany over the last year or so of, at least in our space, we see a lot of the same people. And so it's great for building those relationships, for having awareness and stuff. But really our focus has been about how do we set up conversations with different leaders in the organization based on the value that we're bringing? And that can be virtual conversations. Ideally, it's let's get out on site. The beauty of working with hospitals is a lot of them are not virtual, right? The administrative team is usually in the hospital because their team is in the hospital. And so we have the benefit of being able to say, "Hey, we're going to be visiting the ER and doing a walkthrough and making sure everything's good. Can we come by and talk to you about whatever we're doing?" And pulling in different things. And so one of our strengths is the ability to have, we have IT contacts that we need to get in front of. We have clinical contacts because we're working in the ERs or in the hospital setting. So that's chief medical officer, chief nursing officer, CIO, security, quality and safety. So there's a wide range of different groups that we can go after. Marketing as well. And so making sure that we have those connections. And so one of the things we do track is really trying to see, all right, who is our connection? Who's our stakeholder here? And then try to create some webs of, all right, how do we get to the other pieces of the organization and try to build those relationships so that they at least know who we are, right, when those conversations come up.

That's right. Yep, that's right. It's so interesting that you bring up the red, green, yellow. I just literally looked at a report this morning, part of the thing we were talking about. Looked at a report this morning, and one of the accounts we were looking at the capacity utilization over the past 18 months, and if you look, it's all in the red. And by all metrics of product data, usage login, those sorts of things, this is not a good situation to be in. I literally got a call this morning, it's like a multi-seven-figure renewal. They're like, "No, no, no. We just dialed down so we could do this whole other thing with you guys."

Yeah.

Which we've been talking about internally for like six months. And it's like, I'm the furthest removed from that situation, but I'm looking at it, I'm like, "Who's the account manager here? What's going on? Has anybody checked in?" They're like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's great." And I'm like, okay, so the reality of the dashboard. The value that you think is not what matters, right?

And we are a product-led organization. Our founder is a product guy, build engineer. And so when he looks at the dashboards and stuff and he sees, all right, these people, we have a really low login rate, this is a risk for us. The CS team is educating our internal teams. They're like, "No, that's not a risk. This is why. This is the value that this client sees from it, and they have emphasized this at multiple times." Now we're having the conversation to get there to understand that. But yeah, you're right. The red, yellow, green is not always indicative of what's actually happening.

How do you think about building the value case per client, across your clients? Obviously, you guys have core things that you deliver, core capabilities you deliver to the hospital system, but how do you think about tailoring that or building that case and then presenting that case on some frequency back to your customers?

Yeah, it's a loaded question. Because as soon as you start asking that, my mind goes crazy and spirals because as I said, I love analytics, and so I will find myself in the weeds of looking at data and finding new stories and things that we can bring to a client about what resonates and what doesn't. And what I've found is that every one of these clients are different. Even though they're all hospitals or all health systems, they're trying to create a better patient experience. They all have very unique challenges and unique markets, and it's aligning the different value props that you have to what resonates at that organization. And those things change over time. And so, we have this value, VOI or value on investment strategy that we've put in place quite a few years ago actually, and it's worked really well. We start it before we go live. We identify as part of the discovery process of, what are you looking to solve for? Is it leave rate in your ER? Is it Press Ganey scores or NRC scores improvement? And then we set goals for what that should look like after we go live. Right? And so that's an easy framework. You set your mark, and then you measure, and you see if you hit those numbers and try to make tweaks and improvements throughout along the way.

Mm-hmm.

The thing, though, now that we've been around for a while, is that there's things like plateauing, right, of performance metrics. Do great at first, and then they plateau. You're never going to get to a 100% top box score in Press Ganey. It's not realistic. So those things are going to taper off or priorities change, right? So maybe leave rate has improved to such a level that that's not an organizational goal anymore, right? And so one of the other things that this tool is doing to be able to add value that is going to resonate with leadership teams is at quality and safety. So we've looked at some interesting things about our product where in the ER, we've seen a lower number of reported safety incidents, like calling the actual security because a patient is frustrated and getting violent with a nurse or something. Because our tool is communicating with patients, setting expectations, giving them the information that they typically aren't getting in a visit. And so that actually lowers the temperature in the entire environment for providing a safer environment for the clinical staff, right? And so that's a value prop that we found after we had already gone live at many of these sites, and then we bring that learning from one site to the other hospitals that we work with, and that's probably one of my favorite parts of the job is really just finding new, unique value stories that we've been able to uncover.

Yeah, man. I love that. And you guys have an interesting thing. In a lot of the SaaS markets, okay, this is a B2B product, but you guys have obviously, you have to have a success level within the hospital system. You've got, it sounds like the nurses, the clinical staff, that whole group is interacting with your product on some frequency probably throughout the day. And then you've got the patient experience, who's them and/or their families interacting with it at some part of the day. How have those different levels, selling into the system but serving so many of the different audience segments there, how has that informed your strategy? I think about this a lot in, I'm selling to a customer who's end users of their service is actually my customer. So how do you think about that? I'm curious.

Yeah, I ran into this first with Healthgrades, where I spent a decade working, and we were a consumer website where you can find every doctor in the country listed there. Consumers and prospective patients don't pay for searching on the website, right? The value was the volume of people that were on the site. And so, then health systems would pay for advertising, or pharma companies would pay for advertising on the website. And so we had to balance the interesting fact of, like, all right, even though the people that pay us are these payers or health systems, the only reason they pay us is because consumers find it valuable, right? And so we have to create an environment that is valuable to consumers, but also the people that are paying us still want to leverage. And so the people we interacted with most and got the most feedback from was obviously the health systems and clients who would tell us, like, "Oh, no, the website needs to look like this," or, "You need to have our profiles looking like this." And so it was always an interesting balance of, like, all right, we understand, but you're paying us because we have a consumer value, and we have to create a website that patients will want to come to. And it's the same thing on Vital, where we've created an environment where we make it very easy for patients to access. We get 60 to 70% of patients who are in the ER, in the hospital, logging in while they're actually there, which is actually remarkable. We look at patient portal usage, it's like 12 to 15% while they're in the actual facility. And so we created this tool that's very valuable to patients, but they're not the ones paying for it. The health system is. And so it's reminding the health systems of how to leverage that audience. And one of the things we've started to do as well is really look at what other investments are you making, right? How do we pull those investments into our tool to get in front of patients and leverage the eyeballs that we have and we've been able to capture over this time?

Yeah.

I'm really glad you just went there with the conversation because I was also curious about the inter tech dynamics there with you all. It feels like you're the patient experience layer on top of all this other infrastructure, and do you think about success as well? I would almost consider those maybe even partner relationships in a way, too, where it's like you've got the hospital system accounts that you've got to run, but you've also got these probably likely partnerships or at least working relationships with other organizations that are then feeding your patient experience portals and things like that as well.

Mm-hmm.

How do you think about success in that side of the business as well?

Yeah, it's interesting. I'll talk about patient portals real quick. We view ourselves as a — I think the patient portals view us as more of a competitor, but we view ourselves as an introduction to patient portals for the health systems. When I talk about it, I always say, the patient portal is there to be the relationship between the health system and the patient over their course of their life, right? That is your relationship. That is about prior visits. That's about this visit. That's about all the labs and things and billing and all that stuff. What Vital is here to do is help the patient get through today. We are helping them walk through this visit, feel comfortable, reduce the anxiety, and get you through what is probably one of the harder days of your life. And that is a soft introduction of how to use digital tools like a patient portal and why it's valuable. And we actually drive 30% of patients will click through and log into the portal. We're not trying to take away from that patient portal utilization. It's really part of the value that is being brought to these health systems. And so it's usually one of the first questions that comes up is, like, "Well, we have a patient portal. Why do we need Vital?" And there are two distinct things that we really try to break down and help these health systems understand that this is about a specific moment for a patient, not about the longer-term care journey. When it comes to tying in other partners and things, it's a balancing act of figuring out, again, where do we have partnerships? Where do the health systems have partnerships? And that's really where it stems from mostly is this client has WebMD and video education. How do we pull that into mapping the right videos to patients? This one uses ViewMedica or the DAISY Award and all sorts of different aspects.

Yeah.

Our goal there is really how do we make this stickier, right? We actually had a client who used a nurse notification, nurse recognition platform, and we were only live in three locations out of eight hospitals that the system had. And they deployed this new nurse recognition everywhere, but only the three sites that we had Vital on were getting any type of traction or volume of nurse recognition. And we had heard internally that the person running that nurse recognition program was like, "What is happening? How is this working only at these three sites?" And so it just led to really cool conversations about how those tools can be leveraged and get in front of the right audience.

From what I was looking at online, you all have been expanding at just a really great clip, and I would imagine that that's the success of running a pilot or proof of concept at one site and then expanding that across the network. I guess first, am I making that up? Is that a false assumption? And then two, what's the secret to success? Because you've clearly figured something out there.

Yeah. I think, you know, we have had some success with some clients who have just bought full bore right off the bat when Ascension has decided to go across their entire ER universe, which is close to 80 facilities. And so we launched them all last year. We're just finishing up the last few sites, hopefully in the next month or so. And so that's the anomaly, though. Usually it is, to your point, the pilot to proof of concept and expansion from that point forward. And part of that is because of what you talked about earlier, the finances, right? Like people don't understand the margins that these health systems are working with are razor thin. Everything gets scrutinized. And I think it comes down to like a personnel piece of —

Mm-hmm.

— for you to say, "This is what we're doing, and it's going to cost us millions of dollars, and we're going to do it everywhere," is a risk on your own career, right? And so those proof of concepts, those pilots, are really an important proof point for them to say, like, "Yeah, I'm going to put my name behind this, and we're going to move it forward." And the thing Vital has that I think is really important is, or differentiating, it's really easy to get the emotional buy, right? Because there's two things that have to happen to get any purchase in any industry is you've got to sell on the emotion, get the emotion bought in, and then back that with data, right?

Yep.

It's very easy emotionally to see the value that this brings to patients every day, and I see it in the comments that we get from patients and their family members of how it reduced anxiety. It made them feel comforted to just know what was happening, to feel seen when no doctor's in the room. That is clear and tangible, but it's emotional. It's not value and incentives for the health system to then invest. And so that's really where those pilots come into play is we've got you bought in emotionally. Now let's use the data to show you how it also works. And once you have those two pieces, it's straightforward.

Mm-hmm. You know, it makes me think, the name of the show is "Scaling Trust," and I always think about the relationship like with my guests. So like how are you thinking about scaling trust? But what's kind of interesting, this is a little bit meta for your particular situation, in that you're literally helping the hospital build higher brand affinity and higher trust. Of all the systems I could go to, I will go here because this was the memory I have of that experience. I'm curious, do you quantify that in any way? Do you have metrics around, like, trust over the system versus an urgent care versus a this or that or the other thing? Like, do you have metrics like that? Do you all track that?

Yeah. So, the Press Ganey and NRC, there's ED CAHPS surveys or HCAHPS surveys that happen after every visit across the country. And one of the measures is obviously the likelihood to recommend that facility to a family member to come back, and so that's one of the clear measures. The challenge we, I'll say, that's faced with that is that there's a lot that happens in a visit that is beyond what we do as a technology, right? And I have my own story that I'll share in a minute about like that loyalty story. Lifetime value is a really challenging thing to measure in healthcare, and loyalty, take me back 10 to 15 years, and we've talked about how loyalty is dead in healthcare and all this stuff, but at the same time, I've seen it in my own life. So I found Vital because I was a patient who used the tool at Emory, which is one of our first sites. Actually, our co-founder was an ER doctor at Emory. And I walked into the ER having worked in health tech for a decade and was blown away. And I will drive farther to go to an Emory ER for my family because I know that I'm going to get updated, and my family's going to be updated, and we're going to have all this information that we wouldn't have if I went somewhere else. And so I know that that's a real thing, but it's really difficult to measure. And something we're still creatively trying to track down of like how do we actually fully measure that impact and that value.

Yeah. I know we lived a similar experience with my wife. Like we go at least twice a year. We'll travel from Nashville, Tennessee, all the way up to Rochester, Minnesota, and my wife gets seen there, and it's like, I can't ever imagine a time like pre all life evolving as life does, can't imagine saying like, "Hey, we're going to fly across the country like a couple times a year to go see some doctors," but —

Yeah.

— that's what we do. And it's like —

Mm-hmm.

— and I think about that, like probably your experience at Emory, it's like the healthcare experience is probably this like fusion of like super high emotion, super high financial, like all these things. Like the stakes usually are higher than most other things you have to participate in during the day. And it's like if somebody makes that experience exceptional —

Mm-hmm.

— you almost like, especially in like chronic illnesses and things like that, if you have an exceptional experience there, it's like you almost never want to leave because it's like you have this emotional attachment to like they helped me uncover X or they helped me solve Y or my family member wouldn't be here without X, Y, Z person or whatever those stories are. It's like we almost have a bond there, and it feels like Vital's technology is probably like the intersection of those highest emotion, highest risk, highest financial commitments, like all at once and —

Yeah.

— helping people through that.

So I want to touch on what you just said, though. What you talked about was people, right? You talked about how people make you feel and how the care that they gave you or your wife is really what makes a difference, right? A technology tool like ours is really what we're doing is creating space for those moments to happen. So we're reducing the repetitive questions for clinical teams, lowering the frustration, lowering the temperature in the ER, lowering all of the additional burden of work that is happening in the background so that you can create more of those connected moments. Because ultimately, what I've seen in the data is patients will rate our star, our app five out of five, and then they'll leave a two on the likelihood to recommend because a nurse was rude to them.

Yeah.

Or because they sat in the ER for 18 hours, right? There are things that technology can't overcome, but what we're trying to do is create more opportunities for those human connections to happen. And I think that's really, going back to even what we talked about with CSMs of like how do we automate work so that we can make the team do their best work of being people connectors. That's the same thing we're trying to do in the healthcare space of how do we make it easier for the clinicians, the doctors, to connect with patients and take that burden off of them.

Couldn't agree more. It feels like we are entering a world where as more of our, I don't know, maybe call it production, like more of our output, more of our notes, more of our deliverables, everything is moving, as you said, like where can we automate the most? As more things are automated, we actually have to, I'm processing real-time, it's like we actually have to become more human in many —

Mm-hmm.

— many instances because that's going to be our competitive advantage is get all that out of the way. Like we're no longer valued necessarily by the number of things we make or the number of dials or the number of calls or the number of Zoom meetings, but it's like —

Quality over quantity.

— the quality of those things. Yeah.

I feel like the audience that watches the show, the folks that are trying to share this on LinkedIn as this show builds, it feels like lots of folks are kind of at the Series B, Series C level. There's a lot of like post-sale leaders, or like director, manager, folks growing in their career in a leadership capacity. As folks start to take these things on, what's maybe one piece of advice you would share? Because you've lived this dream. You've been in the rodeo, several different companies, several different missions within the healthcare space. If you could leave one piece of advice, you may have already just said it based on the human aspect of it, but if you could leave one thing for a leader, what piece of advice would you say, "Hey, going into 2027, make that the year that you do X"? Like, what would that be from a success post-sale perspective?

That's a great question. I think for me, it is aligning yourself to something that you're passionate about. And I'm a big believer that I have a theory about careers, and it's almost like surfing. I'm not a surfer myself, but this is kind of the analogy that comes into my mind, and the metaphor of, there's only a few big waves that happen in your lifetime of your career. And your job is really to try to catch those waves and put yourself in a position to prepare yourself to be able to catch those waves. And especially in healthcare, I think this is true where there's bigger things in motion, right? Like CMS and guidelines and regulations and financials of these health systems and what's going on with AI. Those are all things that create the waves. It may be a calm day and you can't really do much, but you've got to get yourself prepared for when that wave comes that you can ride it. And the best way to do that that I've seen is really being passionate about the problem you're solving, not the solution you're selling, but the actual problem and what this is doing for patients or what this is doing for clinicians or doctors or whoever you're serving. Because at the end of the day, I learned this really early in my career. I was selling Yellow Pages ads in college, and Google existed, so this was not too long ago. But it was like, I remember going to these businesses. I'm wearing a suit in South Georgia in the summer. It was awful. And I would knock on their doors, and I would try to get them to buy advertising in the Yellow Pages book, but I did not believe it. I was like, "No one's going to be looking at this thing." And they saw it too, right? They saw right through me. They did not believe in it because I didn't believe in it. And if you're going to be successful, you really have to believe in what you're doing. And what that does is opens you up to be willing to do things that most people wouldn't do and work harder or go the extra mile to be successful. And I think that's one of the things that I've seen at Vital is that because I've lived this experience and been a patient who has used this tool, and I've literally seen the value that it brings, it drives me to do things above and beyond what even I would've done at other companies because I believe in what we do so much. That's a driving force of, you can't always control those things, and careers are challenging. I know the workforce is really tough right now. But if you have that opportunity, lean into it and find that thing that really pushes you.

Some wise words there, Ryan. I'm so glad that I asked that question before we wrap for today. Thank you so much for making time on a Friday.

Appreciate it.

Incredible nuggets of wisdom shared with our audience today. Thank you for making it possible. And I hope as Vital continues to grow, more importantly, as you continue to see success, I hope we have an opportunity to do a check-in and see how life's progressing and what else you're learning these days. So —

Yeah, that'd be great. I appreciate it. Thank you, Matt.

Awesome. Take care, Ryan. Enjoy. See you.

Bye.