Solving America’s Nursing Crisis: Shane Brown discusses NurseIO’s AI-Powered Revolution | Staffing Series

Anthony Codispoti (00:00)
Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Cotaspodi and today’s guest is Shane Brown, the chief executive officer of nurse IO. They are an app based technology platform that connects healthcare professionals with facilities seeking per diem staff with a strong focus on freedom and flexibility.

They empower nurses, CNAs, and other care providers to quickly locate shifts, pick convenient schedules, and earn income on their terms. Shane has extensive experience in medical device commercialization, having held leadership roles at Abbott Laboratories and St. Jude Medical. Over the years, he has steered multiple organizations through mergers and acquisitions and helped drive rapid revenue growth.

even contributing to the IPOs of leading medical device companies. Known as a servant leader, Shane is passionate about creating innovative staffing solutions that empower healthcare workers and ensure patient care is never compromised. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Ad Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line.

One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible. You want to find out if your company qualifies? Contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, the CEO of Nurse I.O., Shane Brown. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Shane Brown (01:54)
Yeah, glad to be here, Anthony.

Anthony Codispoti (01:56)
So Shane, before we talk about Nurse IO, how that came to be, how your opportunity to join the team came about, I want to understand a bit about your track record in medical device companies. You’ve had several notable roles, sales, business development, executive leadership at a number of medical device companies, including some that would go on to be acquired or go public. Is there a particular lesson?

from some of those high stakes moments of building these companies to significant scale that continues to influence how you operate in business today.

Shane Brown (02:36)
Yeah, good question. think the coming off the college campus, I it was a time when software was a big thing and people were jumping into software. People were jumping into kind of business to business sales, all sorts of different things. What initially attracted me to health care broadly and medical device ⁓ more narrowly was that hopefully you could do a little bit of good along the way. It wasn’t just going to be a paycheck. And I think that

Compass has served me well over the years. the medical device industry, the healthcare industry, the ⁓ healthcare IT industry, digital health industry, they’re all really bare knuckle fighting industries. There’s a lot of good competitors. There’s amazing technologies, but that kind of North Star has helped me stay focused on just trying to provide ⁓ some good, whether that’s an innovative device or an interesting algorithm or something that’s gonna help.

your neighbor or my mother or our children to be able to run a little bit better or to breathe a little bit better or to have less burden from a cancerous tumor. All this stuff has driven me. So even as I thankfully worked my way up the quote unquote ladder, I knew somebody in the organization was table side or bedside with a patient. And that’s always meant a lot to me. So with a lot of ⁓ flights over the years, with a lot of

frustration and exhilaration and exhaustion and everything else. It’s always made me feel pretty good when I fall asleep that I’m part of something a lot bigger than myself.

Anthony Codispoti (04:16)
That’s really cool. Obviously, all of us, we want to do well in our jobs. There’s ⁓ incentives, especially in the roles that you’ve had to grow the company to make money. Sometimes you’re just hitting your head against the wall and it’s got to feel really good when you know that, there’s a bigger picture here of helping people, saving lives, making them healthier. Right.

Shane Brown (04:36)
There is, there is. I, a mentor of mine was pretty profound with advice last year, kind of mid last year, kind of spring last year. I left a chapter of a company that was doing really, and continues to do really, really strong, innovative work for patients that are suffering from brain tumors. For various reasons, the company was getting pretty complicated. The venture capital board was

you know, ⁓ very involved, et cetera, et But I ended up leaving that company and the advice that I was given, which was really, really, really perceptive was put together your four or five non-negotiables in order for your next role.

And at the time I thought it was kind of a little bit of a hokey, every Wall Street Journal article will tell you to do the same thing. Harvard Business Reviews will tell you to do the same thing. Anybody in your neighborhood will tell you to do the same thing. Like really think, be deliberate about your next step. But I actually was after I put my skepticism aside, I actually, think I have the card right here somewhere, but I sat for an afternoon.

I thought about it, I prayed about it, I thought about it some more. you know, walked through, I, I force ranked one through five ⁓ of what I wanted in the next ⁓ role that I was going to jump into knowing that I dedicated a lot of myself to the roles that I’m in. And financial compensation was number five. And, and it was, was the scope of the responsibility that it’s a really fulfilling and needed solution.

Anthony Codispoti (06:10)
Interesting.

Shane Brown (06:18)
that it was people that I wanted to work with and for, and in the same sandbox, so to speak, and that we were providing something real. And location was important at this stage of life with three kids that I didn’t wanna be gone 45 weeks out of the year anymore. I wanted to actually live where I slept on the weekends and I wanted to be part of the day-to-day family. So all these worlds came together.

And compensation was number five to that. And that doesn’t mean that I’m a saint and that doesn’t mean I don’t like, you know, to, vacation well with my family and to live well and all those things. But in terms of the opportunity that I wanted to jump into and how I want to spend the rest of my life, compensation’s part of the puzzle. It’s definitely not my driving force.

Anthony Codispoti (07:06)
Interesting. Okay, so how did the door open up for this opportunity at nurse I

Shane Brown (07:11)
That’s a good story too. So I’ve had a friend up here in North Scottsdale for a while, just a nice man that we kind of knew similar circles, know, kind of church circles, so to speak. And he and I would have coffee once or twice a year for several years. And he started talking about this company, Nurse IO, and this was several months ago. This was more than a year ago. And he was talking about this company and he’s the board chair of this company.

And he’s on, you know, kind of the autumn of his career and more board seats than operational roles. And he started talking about it. And because he was talking, like I obviously paid attention and I thought about it and everything else. He never offered me the job. you know, was just talking about how cool the opportunity will be when the company is ready to bring in a healthcare CEO. And so we kept on, you know, every couple of months we’d get together for coffee and just talk about everything under the sun, including nurse IO.

So this got into kind of Thanksgiving timeframe last year, late November, early December. And he said, Hey, this company’s gone through the med tech accelerator from the Mayo clinic and Arizona state university. And they now are absolutely recommending because of the growth trajectory, because of the need to raise some money, because of a launch into the big hospital markets across the country, that they need a healthcare CEO. And the founders are willing to.

step back in a humble way and bring in a true healthcare CEO. And so then I started thinking about this. was like, okay, I can, you in that, you could tell that it was no longer, it wasn’t the board chair just frivolously kind of looking around the marketplace and still trying to sell internally why all these things were important. It was the validation from a legit accelerator of people that know how to launch small companies and scale.

Anthony Codispoti (08:49)
They’re getting serious, you could tell.

Shane Brown (09:09)
It was a board chair who has 50 years of experience in healthcare. It was a meeting with the two founders who were both real people. were best friends from rural New Mexico in high school that had made their way to the Phoenix area independently and were just were really entrepreneurial. And they found this distressed asset in nurse staffing that was kind of brick and mortar. Calling around and saying, hey,

We have four nurses in our lobby. Do you need a nurse today in your facility? And they were savvy enough to fund the company by themselves. They didn’t take in any outside capital, truly bootstrapped to several million dollars of revenue. They brought in a fantastic CTO ⁓ who digitized everything, who was very forward thinking about an app, about AI, about development in AI, about, you know, credentialing, all sorts of different things.

And this company got to a really good place during COVID because everybody was looking for staff to go to a nursing home or a detox center or whatever else. So long story short, when you combined, it was a Phoenix area company based in Scottsdale and close to my home. was AI and forward thinking is going to be a great learning experience for me. It was people that I wanted to work with and wanted to work for both by the board chairman and the two founders who

control the board, all these things came together and it went back to my North Star of how can we help that patient on the table with a really good clinician? And I could just, for now at least, forget about the widget that was gonna help that clinician help the patient and just try to consume myself with getting the right clinicians at the bedside to help that patient on the table.

Anthony Codispoti (10:59)
This just checked all your boxes, right place, right time, ⁓ the four things that came before that number five compensation on that list of non-negotiables. so, okay, so tell us, and we kind of touched on it in the intro, but I want to hear like in more detail from you, what is Nurse.io doing that’s different from sort of more traditional medical staffing firms?

Shane Brown (11:00)
It checked all my

Right.

So the traditional nurse IO business has been a double-sided marketplace. So if you picture a healthcare facility, there’s enormous nursing shortages all over the country. Almost every single facility you can think of from a assisted living center to a nursing home, to a hospital, to a surgery center, everybody’s.

Anthony Codispoti (11:44)
Give us an idea.

How many openings are we talking about at any given time?

Shane Brown (11:48)
Depending on the data source, between 500,000 and a million openings in the United States today. Today.

Anthony Codispoti (11:53)
today, not like,

oh, like there’s 10,000 this week and 10,000 next week. Like in this given moment, you’re somewhere between half a million and a million openings.

Shane Brown (12:02)
It’s one of the biggest problems in the healthcare today. You have a lot of, for a lot of, some of them are systemic, some of them are COVID related. So systemic, our population is getting older, right? And unfortunately more unhealthy. And then when you talk about detox and behavioral health, ⁓ mental health has never been where it is today. It keeps on growing. ⁓ People struggling with addiction.

has never been higher and it continues to grow. Clinicians are getting older and they are retiring. A lot of people, up to 15 % of nurses exited the full-time workforce during COVID because it was not fulfilling work or they didn’t agree with the vaccination ⁓ mandates or they just wanted to do something else with their life. A lot of people, all of us, I certainly did, got introspective with

What do I want my career to look like? I’ve had a chance to get off the road for a couple of months or a year or whatever. Now what does the next chapter hold? So a lot of clinicians retired. The need has never been bigger and it continues to get more. There’s not enough nursing schools that, so systemically, there’s not enough supply of nurses coming in. And a lot of people just wanted more control and empowerment of their career. They don’t want to ask somebody for paid time off.

They wanna be able to just say, yeah, I’m, Phoenix is really hot in the summer, right? So somebody may just make the decision, I’m gonna leave for three months and I’m gonna travel all over the national parks or the baseball stadiums in the United States or whatever. And then I wanna work more in September to Christmas time to make up for the months that I was gone.

And people want that control. Your parents are aging or you want to coach your son’s baseball team or your daughter’s soccer team or whatever. People want more control and they want more empowerment and that’s what I think we do really well.

Anthony Codispoti (14:03)
Say more about that. How are you giving them more control and more empowerment? they just sort of picking like, hey, I want to work one shift today and I don’t know, I’ll figure out tomorrow when tomorrow comes.

Shane Brown (14:16)
Yeah. you can, you picture somebody opening up an app and it’s not Uber eats and it’s not Lyft or Waymo. ⁓ there’s there instead of picking, you know, a pasta that they want delivered or a cheesesteak that they want delivered or that they want to go, you know, to a friend’s house and not worry about parking. they’re going to take an Uber. We’re putting everything in people’s hands. So a facility will post a shift on our app and that shift will have a pictures of the facility.

It will enter exact rates that people will get paid once they fulfill the shift. It will, you know, some places are, Hey, if you work a whole day on Saturday, we are going to offer you a shift lunch or free parking or free bus fare or whatever. So people are seeing exactly what it is. They’re saying, okay, this is at a detox center and I’m going to work there two hours or six hours on Saturday and four hours on Sunday morning. And.

This is rated well by other clinicians. It’s a place that helps get people up to speed that are clinicians. It’s welcoming, it’s accepting, it’s safe.

Anthony Codispoti (15:22)
There’s like reviews

like you would see like on an Uber or something. Okay.

Shane Brown (15:25)
Yep. So we have two way reviews. so people

are open with open eyes are able to say, wow, that facility that’s number one, it’s 15 miles from my house. I only want to go five miles within my range from my house or it’s assisted living. And I only really want to do hospital work from here on out. And so they’re, getting a tremendous amount of details and, you can kind of.

Trial run things too, right? So if you’ve been in a hospital, a rigid hospital environment in your whole career, and you want to take a step back, or you want to moonlight and make a little bit extra money, because life is obviously expensive now, you can say, you know what? I’ve been in hospitals my whole career. I want to try a shift or two or three weekends in behavioral health or detox or school nursing or whatever. And so it’s letting people chart their own path via our app rather than just going and working for

know, hospital why in their community and being subject to all the good, bad, and other things that go with one job for 40 or 50 hours over 25 years.

Anthony Codispoti (16:31)
Is it cumbersome then for them to get paid? Like are they having to, you know, wait for a check to come from that hospital or that detox center? How do you guys sort of facilitate that?

Shane Brown (16:41)
Yeah, we were the first in the marketplace and I think it’s because we listen really well. You know, I think a lot of companies can design interesting technology and can market themselves really well. I think we do a really good job of listening. And so if you put yourself in the shoes of a single dad or a single mom or, you know, somebody who’s trying to make a little bit of money to pay some bills, we decided to go to same day pay in a very transparent way.

And so if I finished my shift at the hospital or the surgery center or the nursing home at 6 p.m., by 8 p.m., I’m going to get paid by our app and then we go and collect from the facility.

Anthony Codispoti (17:23)
So you’re

floating that money to your worker, your employee, your contractor, before you’re getting paid by your customer. Wow.

Shane Brown (17:30)
We are, we are.

We are, because we know how important that

is. You know, a CNA or a nursing assistant, they want to know not just what they’re getting paid, they want to know exactly when they’re going to get paid. And a couple of weeks in the future, it doesn’t feel real good when you’re trying to bring groceries home or you’re trying to figure out, you know, the family budget for the next week or day or whatever. So that was really important to us. And we’re able to do that. ⁓

It’s not necessarily the best thing for our business because to your point, we have to float. And if we pay that same day, we don’t invoice until the following Monday. And we may not collect for 15 days or 30 days or ever from somebody, but we think it’s that important to do to be a good partner for these nurses. So they come back to our app rather than somebody else’s marketplace and say, I work for nurse IO and nurse IO empowers me to pick up shifts all over my neighborhood.

and I’m gonna get paid that same day.

Anthony Codispoti (18:30)
you eliminate those headaches ⁓ for the nurses having to try to collect ⁓ or waiting on a more traditional paycheck, you know, might be a week or two from now. And you guys take on that risk and that hassle because you really want to take care of the nurses, those frontline workers.

Shane Brown (18:44)
We’re in effect our own payday loan service without charging 15 % or some predatory rate. We’re doing it because it’s the right thing to do.

Anthony Codispoti (18:57)
Well, that’s great. And types of facilities. I heard you mentioned detox ⁓ hospitals. Was there assisted care? So like senior living? What other kinds of facilities are your client base?

Shane Brown (19:10)
Yeah, our traditional business has been behavioral health centers, detox centers, rehabilitation centers, like physical rehab centers where people have to learn how to walk again or learn how to use their hands again after a stroke or after a spinal fusion or whatever. ⁓ Skilled assistant living, nursing homes, we call it post-acute and sub-acute.

That’s been the bread and butter of the company. And we’re like on the eve, on the verge of jumping into the hospital market with some really good indicators that we will be very well received in big hospital systems across the country. ⁓ Also, ambulatory surgery centers are doing a lot of procedures and they, you know, if they miss a couple of staff members on a day,

they can’t do as many procedures and so the revenue suffers greatly. it’s basically anywhere nurses are, nursing assistants are, and then within that, everything that we can do to make sure a facility is well staffed.

Anthony Codispoti (20:17)
Talk to me about the company’s growth. How many markets are you guys in? Let’s just start there. How many markets are you in right now, Shane?

Shane Brown (20:25)
We’re technically 90 % of our business is in Arizona. We have a toe in the water in three other states. And we know because of both demographics and the need of hospitals. So you combine those two for the need. And then we also know the regulatory burden of different states. So if you want to go to California, it’s an enormous demographic, but the regulatory environment is so high.

That doesn’t make sense for a really small company that wants to grow to jump into that market next. We know that it’s in our future. We know we want to provide great service for those clinicians in those facilities, but we are, we’ve identified 10 more markets that we want to go into in the next six to 12 months that are both good demographically that have nurses on nurse IOs app already, and will be a regulatory climate that we can succeed in.

Anthony Codispoti (21:21)
⁓ Okay, so say that number again 10 markets in the next six to 12 months Sounds like a pretty big lift. I mean one market alone You’ve got the regulatory hurdles. You’ve got a fine, you know a stable of nurses You’ve got to have the client relationships there. You have to have sort of that supply-demand balance to keep everybody happy How do you sort of think about going into a new?

Shane Brown (21:46)
Yeah, we try to stay as focused and as intelligent as we can, meaning ⁓ the ambitious side of me and probably the, the, the me from 15 years ago would just say, okay, we know we have product market fit in this market. Now it’s time to conquer the world. Let’s go big. Let’s go broad. Let’s go deep. Let’s, let’s boil the ocean. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. The reality is we have less than 10 full-time employees. So we cast a shadow in the marketplace that’s much bigger than our actual company.

That’s part being bootstrapped to, you know, for several years and no outside investors or no outside debt. But we also do things very efficiently, meaning we onboard clinicians very quickly. We credential ⁓ clinicians very appropriately and very responsibly, but also quickly. We know before we go into a marketplace, we know those facilities. We know the proximity to clinicians that want to

work in the gig economy that want to pick up shifts. So we have a lot of intelligence that is not like, you know, my first sales job. I would fly into Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I would open up a Yellow Pages and I would look through, you know, where the surgeon’s offices were, and then I’d go visit those surgeon offices. We now have so much intel at our hands that whether it’s a digital presence or outreach from me or outreach from our sales and marketing team or our founders,

We know where the needs should be from pattern recognition and then our AI tools help us to stay really focused.

Anthony Codispoti (23:22)
I’d like to hear more about what you’re using AI for, because you mentioned about being able to onboard and credential very quickly. Is that one of the places that it comes into play?

Shane Brown (23:32)
It’s one of them. It’s so on a, so just to separate the two things on the development side of our algorithm, of our software, of our product offering, more than 90 % of our development is happening with AI. It’s called cursor AI is, is what we use. And that helps us to, ⁓ in real time, again, listen to the marketplace and in real time we can put in, we can hear about something with a clinician or a facility.

let’s say Monday at noon, we can initiate those changes within our dev software, our AI dev software, and that can hit the marketplace that night. Our app would be totally different or our software can be totally changed by that. Whether that’s, Hey, we need to alert people in hours rather than minutes. Whether that is the rating system, you know, we want to make it easier for people to leave reviews. Whether that is, Hey, blue is more, you know, eye catching than red, whatever that is.

We can listen quickly and then implement almost just as fast. then credentialing and onboarding that you’re talking about. We think we have a distinct competitive advantage. We don’t have a team of 25 people checking TB tests and CPR certification and licensure. It’s not the big, the big onboarding teams are typical at other firms. I’m not going to give away necessarily the secret sauce of how we do that, but.

Anthony Codispoti (24:48)
Is that typical at other firms?

Shane Brown (24:59)
We know that the way we do it is even more thorough and way faster.

Anthony Codispoti (25:07)
come on, pull back the curtain a little bit, Shane, no?

Shane Brown (25:10)
We have very good AI tools that we’ve developed that are proprietary for us that help us scan people’s credentials. And then we’re able to stand by those credentials that they’re accurate, they’re not fraudulent. And if a lot of people are taking a month to onboard credentials, we can do that in a fraction of the time.

Anthony Codispoti (25:35)
like a few days, a couple hours.

Shane Brown (25:39)
Most

of the time were within 24 hours.

Anthony Codispoti (25:41)
Wow, that’s impressive. have to think that that’s a bit like not only is it sort of saving you that labor cost of having somebody manually set aside to review that, but it also gets your providers, your clinicians into the position to be placed at a client site much more quickly. It’s going to keep them happy. Right. They come to your site, they don’t want to wait a month before they’re ready to work today.

Shane Brown (26:09)
Right, right. And especially you go back to that example of ⁓ somebody who wants to get paid pretty quickly, whether they’re moonlighting their life’s more expensive or there’s, you know, an unforeseen expense that comes into their household budget, whatever else, you don’t want to wait by the phone and then apply a bunch of places. You want to get to work as fast as you can. After you decide you want to get to work. And because if you get to work and you work for somebody like us,

Anthony Codispoti (26:29)
Right.

Shane Brown (26:36)
then you’re get paid right away. And that’s different than hoping and praying for an opportunity weeks from now. They can get to going the next day if they decide to do so.

Anthony Codispoti (26:47)
So you mentioned 10 different markets that you got your eye on. Are you ready to mention any of them yet?

Shane Brown (26:53)
⁓ no, I’d prefer not to.

Anthony Codispoti (26:56)
That’s fair. Okay, so, wow, all kinds of places we could go with this. Let’s talk about your mission. Freedom is our culture. What’s the meaning behind that statement? And say a little bit more about how it guides your approach to empowering both your clients, sort of the healthcare facilities, as well as the nursing professionals.

Shane Brown (27:07)
Yeah.

So there was a study, I’ll start on the facility side. So many facilities were left shorthanded during the COVID spikes in 2020 and 2021 and 2022 that they had to sign up a lot of what are called travel nurses or locums or longer term contract people.

And that’s a good band-aid, right? You have somebody who is in Ohio and they pick up a contract in Alaska or California and they just go out there for six months and they work. So on the surface, that makes a lot of sense. In reality, those programs are drastically more expensive than full-time staff, like 50 % more in a lot of ways. And so you and I are working the same shift. I’m a full-time employee. You’re a traveler.

you and I are doing the same job for the same timeframe and you’re getting paid 50 % more than I am. It’s bad for morale. It’s destroyed a lot of the budgets and hospitals. Over 40 % of hospitals are underwater in terms of profitability. And most of that is because of labor spend. And most of that is because of the spikes of the stop gaps that had to be put in as the working field was changing. So… ⁓

that facility in that example or those facilities, they now have the freedom of saying, hey, maybe we don’t need to renew the contract for that really expensive resource that’s doing the same job as everybody else. But maybe if we have in our back pocket a per diem app solution like we have, then if somebody goes out on PTO or maternity leave or, ⁓ you know, is, it calls in sick or has a sick child that they can’t come in for their shift.

we can press the easy button on the nurse IO app and get that shift filled with somebody who’s aligned with our cost structure and our budget and is just as professional and has the same licenses and has the same education as somebody that we’re paying 50 % more. So that gives the staffing people, the chief operating officer or the chief nursing officer or the, know, HR representative that gives them freedom to do what’s right for that ward in that facility for that shift.

And on the clinician side of things or the healthcare professional side of things, I now have the freedom to work where I want to, when I want to. It’s not more complicated than that for us. know people can say, I’m open to a hundred mile radius. I’m open to a two mile radius. I would prefer to stay towards a detox center or an assisted living center rather than, you know, something totally different from that. ⁓ And by the way,

I’ve been rated very highly from this facility and I know that they like me. And so I’m going to put that as one of my favorites. So the second that, you know, a facility puts a shift out to the marketplace, I’m going to get notified by that. So whether I’m at my full-time job or I’m, you know, working outside in the yard, I’m going to get a notification that, you know, St. Mary’s hospital two miles away in the ICU.

need someone and I love working there. So that’s the freedom I have to pick the place, to pick the rate and to be prioritized as somebody that has been rated very well from that facility.

Anthony Codispoti (30:38)
Shane, when you guys go into a new healthcare facility, you wanna bring them on as a new client, what’s the biggest piece of pushback that you typically get and how do you answer that?

Shane Brown (30:50)
The bigger the facility is or the bigger the organization is, the more stakeholders there are. And as we all do, it’s human nature. We all have our pet projects and we all take a thin slice of information. So if we’re approaching somebody, they could be like, hey, we have a staffing agency. We have a contract through our GPO or we have, you we’ve been using this, you know, brick and mortar staffing company across town for 35 years. When they truly understand what we’re doing,

on the per diem side, let alone compared to the other per diem providers, even just take, because like right now you could say our competition is solutions that are similar to what we do, not as good, not as fast, not as foolproof, not as easy, but there’s still a lot of brick and mortar staffing companies that have people that they’re paying every day, whether they’re working or not, and they’re paying benefits and they’re doing a lot of different things.

⁓ our advantage is the analytic because of AI, the analytics that we can pull from things, the rating systems, the same day pay, the transparency of, of our rates compared to the clinicians rates. All of these things help everybody be really transparent and free to do what they need to do. And it differentiates us frankly, you know, there’s theoretically a lot of people can jump up and fill a gap in staffing, whether that’s full time or traveler.

long-term contract or per diem. We just think that we do it the right way and we do it very quickly.

Anthony Codispoti (32:24)
What unique challenges Shane have you guys encountered while fusing healthcare specifically with this technology to complex fields? How does your team overcome that in launching it and evolving the product?

Shane Brown (32:33)
You know, I think, yeah,

I think the biggest, the biggest hurdle and it’s in, it’s, it’s a good problem to have. The biggest hurdle we have is the need to stay focused with limited resources. Meaning every time I’m in a conversation at a dinner party or sidelines of a soccer game or, you know, talking to a potential investor, everybody has an idea about how we could have a marketplace for.

know, jugglers in the circus or, you know, lion tamers or bull riders or whatever else. There’s no shortage of ideas and probably a lot of them would be lucrative, not necessarily the circus one, but a lot of the ones that people approach us with would be lucrative for us. We’re a lot more consumed with healthcare and in the areas where we can genuinely make a difference and land there and expand and do better and better there.

And then if there are things in two or three or five years that make sense, we can certainly get into that. Whether even if that’s including physicians or, you know, all sorts of different other healthcare providers that are not nurses, we are comfortable and confident that our technology, our team and our algorithm will transfer very well to other markets. But our number one opportunity is always to be even more focused and even more deliberate and disciplined about what we need to accomplish today.

tomorrow and over the next 30, 60, 90 days.

Anthony Codispoti (34:02)
Let’s explore this for a moment, Shane, because I’m kind of curious about this. You’re already, you you have relationships with a lot of these facilities that, you know, they need the nurses and you’re providing those. And a lot of them, as you just mentioned, you know, they need physicians too. Like, how do you sort of think about that? Because, you know, with the entrepreneurial brain that guys like us have, you want to go after those opportunities, right? That’s kind of feels like low hanging fruit.

At the same time, you’ve been through this enough to know the value in being hyper-focused, especially at the young stage that you guys are at. So kind of walk us through how you wrap your head around balancing those two things.

Shane Brown (34:43)
Well, I think the complexity of different marketplaces is something to keep in mind. So ⁓ I don’t know if a brain surgeon or a neurosurgeon would be applicable to something like this, but there are a lot of physicians that moonlight by themselves. ⁓ have ⁓ one of my best friends from high school who’s an ER doc. And if he wants to pick up another shift, it’s not the most professional process.

There’s a Facebook page for Chicagoland emergency room doctors. They’re almost openly negotiating. These are, you know, highly educated, professional credentialed physicians, and they’re basically negotiating in front of their neighbors. ⁓ And so we know that all these things, there’s a need, but with a small team with limited resources for now, it’s very important that we’re focused. And the reason why it’s important is not just

resource allocation and proving its credibility. I personally wouldn’t want somebody to approach me if I was the president of a hospital or CEO of a hospital or nursing director. I wouldn’t want somebody to approach me and say, hey, behind door number one, I can offer you this whole team of people behind door number two. And by the way, I have parking lot attendance and I have housekeeping and I have…

you know, people that are gonna work ⁓ on weekends to help traffic in and out. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (36:12)
And I got jugglers

and jesters and yeah.

Shane Brown (36:15)
We

got it all, but I wouldn’t want to be approached that way. I’d like to know somebody is passionate about what I’m passionate about. So if I’m a chief nursing officer, I don’t want to talk about an ER doc. I want to talk about getting the second shift tomorrow filled.

Anthony Codispoti (36:30)
No, it makes a lot of sense. They want to see that you’re focused. It’s certainly helpful for you guys at this young stage. And you see a lot more value in going into new geographical markets first, really establishing yourself, establishing the brand name. And then you can look two, three, four, five years down the road at maybe adding on some of those other positions, if it makes sense.

Shane Brown (36:52)
That’s the fun part. The fun part is we have a very big challenge and puzzle to crack now, but there are a lot of puzzles that are waiting to be solved. And I think the speed and the team and the technological ⁓ progress that we’ve made, I think we’re going to be able to help a lot of different puzzles.

Anthony Codispoti (37:11)
Shane, what’s a serious challenge that you’ve had to overcome in your business or personal life? What was it? How did you get through it? What did you learn?

Shane Brown (37:21)
Yeah, this is pretty near and dear. ⁓ I’ve always tried to be as transparent as possible and have very genuine and real relationships. And that served me well for a long time. I certainly wasn’t somebody who was running into the office, quote unquote, on Monday and telling everybody about my weekend. But I genuinely value people and I want to be valued by people.

⁓ I’ve been in a couple of scenarios, including, you know, fairly recently, not with nurse IO, but previous to nurse IO where everything was from a board perspective. Everything was a spreadsheet rather than the depth of somebody’s character or the intangibles of leadership that, you know, don’t show up on a balance sheet, but are trending in the right direction. Meaning, ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (38:08)
Yeah.

Shane Brown (38:18)
A venture capital community, and I’ve worked with a lot of really good venture capital investors, I really have, that are genuinely vested in the company financially. They care, they want to make introductions, they want to help to pressure test strategies and all sorts of other stuff. But there’s also, you know, that 10 % of venture capital investors that, even though they’ve never worked in a company, they have a great MBA, they have great analytical skills, they’re brilliant people.

They think they know everything about operating a company and they’re in a tough position too, right? Like they have to report back to their investors and their GPs and their limited partners and everything else. But the board interactions that I thrive under and the venture capital relationships that I truly treasure to this day over several different stops are those that trust the operators. And yeah, you know, there’s, if you put it together and you get buy-in for a strategy,

Anthony Codispoti (39:11)
Yeah.

Shane Brown (39:16)
Healthcare is not the fastest moving business. It’s really not. You’re having to change consensus of all the neurosurgeons in the country or the FDA or CMS for payment for a device. All these things take time. And so you can’t default to, hey, you told us on last Wednesday that you were incorporating a new go-to-market strategy. It’s now Friday afternoon. How come we haven’t seen any uptick yet?

Things take time and you have to really know the business really well. You have to be secure in your knowledge and you have to be very trusting of operators. That doesn’t mean you should sit on your hands and let the operating team do whatever they want. You have a vested interest. It’s very important for you and your reputation and your fund that you’re doing things properly. But if you’re relying on a low trust environment and you know, almost micromanagement, you’re never going to capitalize on the true potential of an organization.

that genuinely believes in the leader in place. So I went through that in the last couple of years. like I led off with, I’m a genuine people and I like genuine relationships. And I was put in a position where ⁓ there were things going on behind the scenes, know, potentially from a board level that were not appreciating the blood, sweat and tears that I was doing day to day. And I just wish that there was more candor, there was more…

transparency, there was more honor to the agreements that were set forth when I was joining the company. But those are things I don’t blame anybody. It’s not the way I would have conducted things, but they have to do what’s best for their investment. It’s just some of the stylistic things that I wish were handled a little bit differently, knowing that there’s some presidents or CEOs that no matter what you say to them, it’s not gonna impact them any way, or form.

⁓ a big ego potentially or really, really, really thick skin. I think the people in this day and age, especially they respond to people that are real people that are in a, in a, in a chair that’s, you know, perceived as higher up on the food chain, meaning, you know, ultimately an investor has every right to remove an executive. ⁓ but I think that that sets organizations back. And so, but I had to go through, I was a casualty of that. I ended up leaving on my own terms, but

Anthony Codispoti (41:40)
Yeah.

Shane Brown (41:42)
I was a casualty of that and that hurt in a big way. It didn’t change who I thought I was as a person or anything existential, but it was, wow, I just spent so many years dedicating every free moment and ounce of thought and emotion to this venture that you can’t marry yourself to a company, right? You marry yourself to a spouse, you marry yourself to raising children or dogs or whatever else that…

or you know, you’re blessed with, but you can’t put your self-worth or your confidence in the hands of anybody in a corporate realm because it is what it is. It’s people that are hopefully doing what they think is best, but don’t exactly understand the entire picture.

Anthony Codispoti (42:29)
It sounds like you found yourself in an environment where the culture of the leadership did not align with you and your values. like good on you for, you know, taking a step back from that. And I applaud sort of that mindset of, know, you can’t allow that to sort of define your value, your worth, who you are. But let’s be honest, Shane, that’s easier said than done, right? Like you would put so much

of your blood, sweat and tears into that, that’s a tough transition to make where it’s like, man, I have been busted my rear end here and I’m not getting appreciated. And now I’m in a position where I’ve just got to step away from this. Like, did you really not have sort of that existential crisis even to some degree?

Shane Brown (43:16)
No, you know, I’m fortunate enough that ⁓ I was born with a lot of confidence and my parents will attest to that, so will my older siblings, because I was always ⁓ heckling them. But I was born with a lot of confidence. I’ve accomplished a lot and I feel good about what I’ve accomplished. I’ve had amazing amount of belief in my faith and in my family and closest relationships that, so I think the foundation is

you know, was really set. Some of it I was born with, some of it I was blessed with, some of it has just built over time. And so truly no existential threat, but it definitely punches you in the gut a little bit of, wow, that’s how it went down. You know, wow. You know, that, that person, there’s this adage that you see a lot on social media now of like having somebody in the room when you’re not in the room.

that thinks as highly of you as, you know, when they’re sitting in front of you type stuff. I’m butchering the meme, but in effect, finding out afterwards the people in the room, there were some that were very supportive and there were some that were very supportive when I was sitting in front of them for lunch or dinner or a meeting, but that were the exact opposite behind closed doors. That’s the part where if you’re serious about relationships and you want to be a genuine person and you want to be, you know, trusting, those are the things that make you scratch your head like,

Anthony Codispoti (44:19)
Mm-hmm.

Shane Brown (44:38)
Wait a minute, you know.

Anthony Codispoti (44:39)
It’s hard

to understand that lack of authenticity when that’s not the way that you’re wired. Yeah.

Shane Brown (44:44)
Right, exactly.

So what it did is back to the priority list of the five things for the next venture and the next chapter.

Anthony Codispoti (44:51)
I was going say, it opened

up you to sort of reevaluate things.

Shane Brown (44:54)
it

reevaluated my priorities. Probably 10 years ago, it would have been title, compensation, know, ⁓ really flashy technology. Now those things are number five. You know, the location, the people, the board, the founders, all those things are very, very important to me. And I’m thankful now for that last experience because I wouldn’t have been able to distill down to my true North now without some of those

hiccups or punches in the guts or whatever else in that last chapter, I wouldn’t be what I’m doing today.

Anthony Codispoti (45:28)
you wouldn’t

understand what it is that you wouldn’t have had sort of that compare contrast to say like, that is something I do not care for that is not me, unless that had been sort of thrust upon you.

Shane Brown (45:41)
Exactly. And I’ve been, I was asked to join a board myself for the first time in terms of a corporate board. I’ve been on nonprofit boards and other things, but, ⁓ corporately it’s given me a whole different perspective on asking questions and empowering an operating leader rather than second guessing, gossiping, poking, you know, micromanaging. It’s like, Hey, you’ve probably already thought about this, but if you haven’t, maybe, you know,

Could we talk about X, Y, and Z? That’s a lot different than, you really need to do this. It’s like, yeah, we did that six months ago and it didn’t work. You have to give people some trust and some benefit of the doubt.

Anthony Codispoti (46:21)
Shane, how would you describe your superpower?

Shane Brown (46:25)
I don’t know if I have a superpower. I think I’ve been fortunate enough to be surrounded by really strong mentors, to be raised in a really phenomenal family, to have a wife that has been really, really good for me, to have a faith that drives everything that I do. ⁓ I don’t personally have a superpower, but I’m very appreciative of the people that have

you know, helped to form me along the way, whether that was a ⁓ sports coach or a teacher or my parents or my older siblings or, know, somebody in the community that took an interest into my smile and what I was trying to do and, helped to corral me and do a different way. my superpower is probably appreciation. Like I, I genuinely appreciate people that go out of their way to make an introduction for me, or I know on the side that they are in that room, the proverbial back room, and they’re saying,

I met with him yesterday, he’s what he says he is, rather than, yeah, you’re great, you’re great, and then get the dagger ready behind the scenes.

Anthony Codispoti (47:33)
I love that answer your superpowers appreciation, but let me push a little bit because you’ve had a lot of success You know, you’ve alluded to that we talked, you know touched just on a handful of things that you’ve done You know, are you a good salesman? Are you good at sort of seeing the chessboard in a different way than other people are you good at sort of identifying talent and Spotting. that person should be here kind of a thing like Let’s set a humility aside a little bit

Shane Brown (48:01)
that’s, ⁓ I think it’s uncomfortable. I don’t like interviewing. I’m not talking about like a podcast interview. I don’t like interviewing for a job because then I have to talk about myself. So, ⁓ I think that I, and then this, this isn’t self-depreciating. I think I’m

Anthony Codispoti (48:04)
I can tell it’s a little uncomfortable for you.

Shane Brown (48:21)
pretty simple minded, meaning I’ve been involved in all these really complicated fields, electrophysiology, like you’re talking to a physician that’s looking, that has a catheter in somebody’s heart and they’re putting energy to interrupt a bad arrhythmia. They’re looking at a 64 lead EKG and they’re able in real time with a heat source in their hands in somebody’s heart to say, in lead 13 in the third segment,

I know if I ablate where that’s coming from, I’m going to help this person get out of atrial fibrillation or SVT. That’s really complicated. I don’t think I could do that no matter how much education I had. It’s just a processing speed that’s very, very fast. But what I’m able to do is to build trust quickly and to distill really complicated things into very simple distilled messages. Meaning like I could, when I was in that role in electrophysiology,

I could travel the world and talk to any electrophysiologist that I wanted to. It wasn’t to go toe to toe on the 13th lead and the fourth segment of that patient, but it was to ask the right questions, to build trust, to plant a couple of seeds for them to think about that ultimately helped the organization refine the product roadmap or to pick up business or whatever. But I think I’m pretty good at communicating and I’m pretty good at distilling complicated things into…

more distilled messages and I think the relationships have served me well. I think that personally, professionally, a ⁓ appetite for relationship, but also being able to build trust quickly has benefited me in all realms of my life.

Anthony Codispoti (50:01)
I’d say what I’ve had the pleasure of working with some folks that are really good at sort of taking complicated topics and being able to break them down into ⁓ bullet points that are distilled and easy to wrap your head around. it’s one thing to sort of just talk about it on the surface here, but when you sort of see it in play, it’s such an easier way to get folks on board with the mission and moving forward.

Shane Brown (50:30)
Yep.

Anthony Codispoti (50:30)
whether

it’s your team members, whether you’re trying to present a new idea to your clients, whether you’re trying to get providers on board, when you can think of that language that makes this complex idea really easy to distill down and digest, it’s pretty powerful.

Shane Brown (50:46)
They say the average American is bombarded with over 5,000 promotional messages a day. And that could be everything, right? That could be on TikTok, that could be on a billboard, that could be in the midst, you know, a commercial in the midst of a podcast. It could be a lot of different things. So try to fast forward to that of a really talented clinician who has a full docket of surgeries on that day or patients on that day or budgets to pour through on that day.

They’re getting bombarded like everybody else in the country is getting bombarded. And they also have a really complicated, important, beneficial, or vital job to do. So I think the old adage with marketing, I’m sure you know these same things, is like seven different ways to seven different times for a message to resonate with somebody. I think it’s even more appropriate now that making things easy for people to digest. If they want to dive deeper, then be prepared to dive as

deep as anybody wants to, to peel that onion. But in the meantime, make it very basic. know, like people reach out blindly on LinkedIn now, like nonstop. And it’s like, I don’t need a manufacturing solution. I’m not manufacturing anything. I don’t need a workforce solution for 18 countries. I’m in one state of one country. You know, it’s like, if people just did a little bit of homework, ⁓ it would, it would go a lot better because

Otherwise you’re just doing blind outreaches and hoping that if you have a broad net, it’s going to yield something back to you. How about spending more time and making a very narrow approach plan and knowing a little bit about somebody you’re reaching out to. So people are actually not gun shy about going into LinkedIn to go to their mailbox because they know it’s going to be 750 people in 24 hours that have nothing to do with the business that you’re running.

Anthony Codispoti (52:36)
Well, think that we sort of shifted the message there a little bit, but I think it’s a really powerful one for, you know, folks to absorb, you know, especially folks who are in kind of the sales and marketing side of things. Cause I hear this a lot from people that like, yeah, I’m tired of getting bombarded with the things that hit my inbox all the time are, need eat merchant cash advances. No, never have never been in the position for that. Like do, do a little homework. ⁓ and so, you know, and I think there is sort of this mentality out there that

Shane Brown (52:55)
Yes.

Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (53:06)
Hey, let’s just take a shotgun to the wall. I’m gonna hit 999 people that are not a fit for this, but maybe I’ll get one. And if you were to take the time to do a little bit of research, get to know somebody a little bit before you reach out, you’ve got a much more tailored message. You can offer something of true value to them. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that. So I’m glad we sort of took that little tangent there.

Shane Brown (53:30)
Are you trying to politely say that I went off ⁓ slope?

Anthony Codispoti (53:35)
⁓ I think it’s great. mean,

that’s the beauty of these conversations. We’re not locked into a specific structure. It’s just, I told you before we went live, like I’m going to ask some questions and I don’t know where it’s going to go. So you and I will just roll with it. So I think that was great. ⁓ One thing I’m curious to hear, know, somebody who’s had the kind of success that you had, Shane, are there particular things that helped to keep you?

Shane Brown (53:48)
You

Yep, thank you.

Anthony Codispoti (54:03)
on schedule, on target, centered, ⁓ help you start your day, different ⁓ habits, routines that are really instructive and helpful for you.

Shane Brown (54:13)
Yeah, I think up until a couple of years ago, I was one of those obnoxious people who didn’t need to sleep very much. Like I’d literally be, ⁓ you know, the last person at a function and then the first person in the gym the next morning with like four or five hours in between. ⁓ I think the routines are important to me and I’m not, you know, as young as I was several years ago, that it’s very important for me first thing in the morning. It’s still really early. It’s it’s four thirty, it’s five, it’s five thirty, but

it’s of ⁓ some sort of reflection, whether that’s a formal Bible study or a ⁓ just a quiet time to reflect a little bit and to pray or to just be quiet and silent and have peace. That’s kind of why I’ve told my family forever, like, why do get up so early? It’s because that’s time that I don’t have to feel guilty about anything. Like I’m not taking away from the family, everybody else is asleep. I’m not taking away from my job.

I’m not taking away from an organization that I’m working for. I’m taking, you know, if you look at debits and credits, I’m, I’m debiting out of my own, you know, bank to wake up at 4 30, where a lot of people are waking up at 6 30. Meaning like I can do whatever I want with that time. And, so that’s, I didn’t start out as a, as a, you know, out of college as like a real early bird, you know, wake up with a rooster’s type of person, but I definitely am now. And because it allows me that

devotional time, that Bible study, that prayer time, that quiet time. And then most days of the week, whether it’s five or six, sometimes seven is some form of exercise, whether that is a good lift or a good hike or, you know, kind of a run walk or a quick jog, whatever that is, that helps me a tremendous amount. And then now, like even when I was that obnoxious person that, you know, got four hours of sleep a night, I never drank coffee.

Like I had never had a couple of years ago, I was like, Hey, I like coffee ice cream. like the smell of it. I’m tired of going to coffee meetings and having hot chocolate, like a little kid, or having a, having a bottle of water for the 10th time in the day that I really enjoy coffee. Now my wife makes a great French press and we have a couple of minutes after I come home from the gym, before I jump into my schedule, where we have coffee together and it’s a nice French press and we’re sitting outside in Arizona and you know, it’s, it’s a nice way for us to be connected as well. So.

Those routines, back to answer your question directly, routines help me to stay very grounded. ⁓ I noticed when we go on vacation or we were at a family reunion last week, I almost can sense myself getting a wave. Obviously you’re not able to do all those things if you’re running around with the family on vacation or with your in-laws or whatever else and you’re trying to do a lot of different things in the course of a day.

but I can feel the difference in myself. I can feel myself getting impatient. I can feel myself not thinking as clearly. I can feel myself, you know, not the best version of myself. When I am grounded in my routines and my foundations, especially in the morning, I’m good to go. I’m good to go.

Anthony Codispoti (57:22)
That’s Shane Brown time you get up you you have time for exercising personal reflection the prayer. It sounds like then you sort of ⁓ ease your way into like social interaction. The coffee with your wife sounds like a nice way to kind of ease into that. That’s beautiful. Just one more question for you, Shane. But before I ask it, I want to do two things. First of all, everyone listening, I want to ask you to pause just for a second. Go to your favorite podcast app, hit that Follow button.

Shane Brown (57:38)
Yep. Yep.

Anthony Codispoti (57:51)
I want you to continue to get more great interviews like we’ve had today with Shane Brown from Nurse I.O. Shane, I also want to let people know the best way to either get in touch with you directly to follow your story or that of Nurse I.O. What would that be?

Shane Brown (58:06)
Yeah, shane at nurse io.com is my email address. I don’t hide behind it. I actually love hearing from people. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (58:14)
And take

a moment and just tailor your message to him, whatever it is. Sorry, go ahead.

Shane Brown (58:19)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don’t just say, hey, we

want to sell you, you know, 50 acres in London. Like I, that’s not the business I’m in. So don’t send me that email. But ⁓ LinkedIn I think is no matter, I was critical of the ⁓ bombardment of the inbox, but I think the companies that care and the people that have been experienced in different realms, it’s still a really good forum for idea sharing and everything else on Twitter slash X. There’s a nurse IO.

follow there, you know, there’s Facebook pages, but I think the best way is probably LinkedIn or to email me directly or to be on X. whether you’re a facility or a clinician or you’re just really interested on where staffing is going in the future, I’d love to be in touch.

Anthony Codispoti (58:57)
That’s great.

.

And we’ll try to include links to all those things you just mentioned in the show notes for folks. So last question for you, Shane, you and I reconnect a year from now and you’re really excited. You are celebrating some big thing. What’s that big thing you’re celebrating a year from

Shane Brown (59:20)
Yeah, I think ⁓ the launch into the 10 more markets is going to be fun. We’re going to learn a lot. Hopefully we do more beneficial execution than distracting beneficial, but either way we’ll learn a lot. The launch of our brand new software program is going to be ⁓ more details to follow, but it’s going to take the industry by storm.

Anthony Codispoti (59:42)
brand new

song, what are we talking about here? What can you say at this point?

Shane Brown (59:47)
Well, we’re talking about a company that was built on an app that now will have a comprehensive suite on staff optimization tools. So we will no longer be a one trick pony. We will now be in a place to help people schedule, to help people credential, to help people to analyze their spend, to find, you know, the best and the brightest. All of those things are going to be in our new suite. And we’re about to sign an agreement in the next couple of weeks that is.

goes from a soft launch of our new software to prime time in a few weeks time. when you…

Anthony Codispoti (1:00:22)
Is this

out right now? said it’s soft? No, the soft launch hasn’t happened yet.

Shane Brown (1:00:25)
It’s

off-launch is happening, but just kind of really tight circle just to make sure that we, think it’s as good as we are. And the reviews are better than imagined. And so we’re going through a very competitive marketplace because there’s several companies that do what we do in terms of matchmaking and connecting clinicians with, with healthcare facilities to truly helping hospitals and assisted living and all these facilities to staff better.

Anthony Codispoti (1:00:30)
Okay.

wow.

Shane Brown (1:00:54)
to manage their spend, to appreciate their employees better, to genuinely help out in a lot bigger way. And by the way, the app is still a tool, but it will be a part of a suite of tools rather than just one tool.

Anthony Codispoti (1:01:09)
My goodness, I feel like we buried the lead here, Shane. Like that sounds pretty amazing. We’re going to have to have you back on when that’s been out in the market. We can talk about that a little bit more because yeah, yeah, excited about that. Well, Shane, Shane Brown from Nurse.io. I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Shane Brown (1:01:19)
That sounds good.

Hey, I had fun, Anthony. Appreciate the forum and it was really nice getting to know you.

Anthony Codispoti (1:01:33)
Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.