8 Tough Lessons from Closing 12,000 Customers at WebPT

Please welcome WebPT President and Co-Founder Heidi Jininga, WebPT CEO Nancy Hamm, and Battery Ventures VP Marketing and Communications Becky Buckman.

All right, thank you very much. We know that this is a busy day, there's a ton of sessions available to all of you, so we really appreciate you taking time to to come to our session today. My name is Becky Buckman. I run marketing and communications for Battery Ventures. It's a global technology-focused investment firm. I'm actually standing in for my partner Chelsea Stoner, who's on the board of WebPT. She had a medical issue today, but I'm super excited to be here and be joined by two amazing women from WebPT, Nancy Hamm and Heidi Janenga. And today, for about the next 40 minutes, we're going to talk how both of you and your respective teams help propel WebPT WebPT to become an industry leader and amass, I think it's now 13,000 customers around the globe. So I'll let you two introduce yourself and just tell us a little bit generally about WebPT.

So I'm Heidi, um, I am the PT in WebPT. I'm a physical therapist turned tech entrepreneur, and prior to starting WebPT, I had been practicing for about 15 years specializing in sports medicine and outpatient orthopedics. Um, I worked my way up through management, became a clinic director, one of the largest sports medicine practices, uh, in the country. Um, and that's really where the idea of WebPT was born. I had P&L responsibilities, and one of our largest expenses was transcription and dictation. And so I wanted to find technology that could replace that, uh, and when we looked, there really wasn't anything out there that met my needs. And so From that point on, we built a product and we launched it in February of 2008, uh, out of the back of a coffee shop with one employee. And fast forward today, as, as Becky mentioned, we have almost 13,000, uh, practices using our platform, which equates to just shy of 40% market share, uh, and over 65,000 users hitting our platform every single day.

Nancy.

Well, hello everyone. I'm Nancy Hamm. I'm the CEO of WebPT. I had the chance to join this amazing woman 2.5 years ago to partner up and help fuel the growth of WebPT. My background is 25 years in healthcare IT. First company was greenfield startup to IPO, then a public company turnaround and recap, to venture-backed companies, to strategic exits, and then running a large tech division for a very large payer. So I'm really delighted to be here today.

All right, great. Well, I think we'd like to drill down without further ado into our main topic, which is 8 lessons learned from creating your own category. And I think naturally this starts both from the company's perspective but also from an investor's perspective with looking outside of mainstream markets for opportunity. From our standpoint at Battery, we kind of have a history of looking outside major tech hubs like Silicon Valley or Boston and New York to look for companies. So with WebPT being based in Phoenix, that was a great fit and a really interesting opportunity for us. We were obviously very excited to partner with a female founder, who we're seeing more and more of in our portfolio. But also, obviously, we were taken by the fact that WebPT was thriving and growing in a market that a lot of our competitors weren't paying attention to. I think that one of the things that's also interesting is that when WebPT decided to go and look for a new CEO, when Nancy joined, They wanted somebody who knew something about SAS, maybe, but even more important, they thought that domain expertise in healthcare IT was something that was equally or more important. So Nancy, maybe you can just talk about that and your choice in joining the company.

Well, when I joined, I did have 25 years of healthcare domain expertise, and specifically digitizing healthcare, starting at the beginning from primary care, the first electronic claims transactions, electronic prescriptions. So I did have a lot of experience in helping different sectors of healthcare go from offline to online, and then to really, you know, accelerate as a profession. But it had all been enterprise software, no SaaS. But I said, you know, I got this, how hard can it be? So I'll just tell you a couple of quick stories of my very impressive first week at the company. So I started in the marketing department. I thought, wow, we have a lot of people in marketing. I I'm sure we can tighten that up a little bit, liberate some operating expenses. And so I went down the hall, met with the head of marketing, and I discovered a lot about inbound SaaS, about SMB, the importance of building this machine, as I call it now, that generates all these lovely leads. So I had to cross idea number 1 off my list of rationalizing marketing. In fact, we were below benchmarks for SaaS companies. So then I went over to the sales department. I said, hey, I logged into Salesforce and I can't find any pipelines. And they all looked at me really weird because remember, I'd never done SMB before. And they said, well, Nancy, you know that marketing machine you just met? They generate all these consistent leads. We schedule a demo in the same day. The demo is the sale, and we close everybody in month. We don't need any pipelines. I'm like, oh. Okay, I'm not doing very well here. So I was the CFO, so I went down the hall to finance to meet my people in finance, and I said, I know what we'll do. In enterprise software, it's all about contracts, long-term contracts, so we should, we should do that and lock in all these customers, thousands of customers. And they said, well, trying to be nice to the new CEO, you know, we have 99% customer retention, we have over 100% MRR retention, credit card swipe, monthly, why do we need to change? I thought, oh boy. So I went down to my office and thought, I better quit having any bright ideas. So the only good thing I did my very first week on the job was I injured myself. Heidi promptly referred me to a good physical therapist. So at least I started acquiring physical therapy domain expertise. So needless to say, I've learned a lot about SAS. And it's been a really fun ride.

And you didn't get injured on purpose just to get more experience with it?

You know, I was. I was really trying to do something right my first week, so I will neither confirm nor deny that.

All right. So clearly you were somewhat of an outsider your first week, which is one of our first lessons. But in my experience, though, and probably in yours, being successful isn't just about finding a place where no one's been before. Heidi, do you want to talk a little bit about that? Sure.

You know, just because you're the first to do something doesn't mean necessarily that it's the right fit or it's the right thing to do. And I think sometimes when you can't actually find a solution for something, it does take a little bit of initiative to just go out and build it yourself, and that's exactly what we did. The WebPT story starts in 2006, and as I mentioned, it was born out of the need that I had as a, as a clinician and also as a practicing therapist and clinic director. And when we took a look at what was there in the physical therapy space, in the landscape, There were server-based platforms. They were very expensive. I would have had to, you know, hire IT staff to deal with hardware. And there really wasn't anything specific for the rehab therapy industry. It was very physician-based. And the workflow of a therapist, if any of you have been to a clinic before, very different than, you know, the once-a-year visit that you might, might see a physician for. And so when we finally said, you know, we're going to, to build this, originally it was just supposed to be for my practices. And when we actually did our market research, we found that 80% of physical therapists were still using and documenting on pen and paper back in 2007. So light bulb goes off, um, and we understood that, hey, the problem I was having was actually ubiquitous within the industry, and we might have stumbled onto something here. So we launched the company in February of 2008, and as we continued to grow, we recognized, um, that the market looks kind of like an upside-down pyramid where 60% of the market was small businesses. You had a middle tier of medium to small size, or, I'm sorry, medium size, and then you had enterprise, which is really where all of the competitors had really looked to, is going to the enterprise space, and specialized mainly in billing, because you want to get paid first and foremost. We zigged when everybody else zagged. So knowing the domain expert— having the domain expertise of, as a physical therapist, our biggest pain point was documentation. And so that's where we started. And we partnered with a best-in-breed sort of strategy of, of, um, being able to connect to a lot of these billing platforms. So no, none of our customers had to change anything they had instituted. It was really now bringing on a new product within, um, their clinic or organization. And so we started out, uh, true SaaS. We were the first web-based application, first SaaS product in the industry. We charged $49 per provider per month. Sold 5 clinics our very first month, and here we are today with close to 40% market share. So it's been a— and that's in 10 years. Fast forward 2019. So it's been an amazing ride, but hitting our stride in understanding, really understanding the market and also creating the category for ourselves through multiple ways, which we'll talk a little bit more about as we go along.

And I think, Heidi, you and I have talked about as you carve out and create your own category, sometimes you have to say no to expanding into other adjacent markets, which can be very alluring, right?

Yeah, as we started to grow and, you know, you get, you know, VCs starting to sniff around, and, you know, even as we approached angel funding, you know, after we had been bootstrapped for 4 years, our— the first question, well, is your— is your market size too small? Or it seems It seems like your market size is very small since you're very niche. Um, and one thing we get a lot of credit for now is having the discipline to stay very focused on our core competency, which was rehab therapy. Um, and with the ability to continue to grow our TAM, but also with the greenfield opportunity that was there, we just took advantage of owning our space and owning our market, and that's what we've done.

Yeah, and I think from an investor perspective, having you guys be such an expert and so kind of dominant early on in that one specific vertical. I sometimes call it a niche market, but as Nancy reminds me, it's really not so niche, right?

$33 billion is not very niche, and with a lot of opportunity for it to double or triple in the near term.

Exactly, exactly. And there's, there's a lot of other niche healthcare markets. I mean, just as an example, um, at Battery, we invested in a company called Brightree, which is outside of Atlanta, which makes software for the home healthcare market. Um, even another company similar healthcare IT company that made software for like clinical blood laboratories. So I mean, it's amazing what the efficiencies and the low cost of the cloud can allow you to do as far as industry, um, specialization. But I think that kind of brings us to lesson number 3, which is think depth, not breadth. Um, Nancy, maybe I'll turn this over to you. Do you wanna talk about how by narrowing your market and staying focused, um, you can actually expand your revenue, in particular your MRR per customer?

For sure. So as Heidi shared, the company was founded with one killer product, electronic medical record, and a maniacal focus on being the best, being first, being SaaS. And that made sense because that is what you have to have. But as time has gone on, what our customers told us is once they got off pen and paper— so amazing— and started moving to digital, they said, hey, we see so many opportunities now to digitize democratize the rest of our business, both clinically and financially. So that's the path we've been on. We have more than 13 products now in our 11th year. And so we started with other products that were must-haves, like the need to bill out electronically, of course, to schedule patients, to do appointment reminders. But then we started inventing products that they didn't know they needed, which has been really cool. Things like patient relationship management, ways to engage the patient clinically between visits, now referral relationship management. So we've really been able to expand all the ways that we help our customers. While we've been expanding horizontally though, we've also been going deeper clinically in each product. So 10 years ago, physical therapy was mostly orthopedic related, sports medicine. You know, you hurt yourself running or skiing, you had a knee replacement, but now the industry is much more clinically intensive, and so now there are specialties in pediatric physical therapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy, geriatric care, women's health, and so as we've been expanding horizontally, we've had the opportunity to go deeper as well. A quick example, hand therapy. So it's— to serve hand therapists, you have to be be able to document what you're doing, bill for it, have a clinical outcome, have a home exercise, have the supplies that you need, and have analytics that are relevant to that particular need. So expanding horizontally as well as clinically intensively.

And that's allowed you guys to essentially double MRR, right?

Well, yeah, so now MRR has grown by more than 50% in the last 3 years alone, And we're in that really happy place where we could more than double the company if we just sold, just sold all the current products to all the current customers.

Okay, great. So obviously, you know, creating deep relationships with your customers and having that knowledge within your industry seems to be a real theme here and a real driver behind the company's growth. And I think this kind of leads us to lesson number 4, which is continuously innovate through proactive listening. Because obviously if you're not listening, you're not gonna hear what your customers and be able to serve them better. So as far as taking your company and really separating it from the rest of the pack, how have you leveraged customer feedback specifically?

Well, I think that has been part of our secret sauce from the very beginning. We really wanted to create a community around WebPT where it wasn't just about a product, but it was actually truly embracing the industry. We call our customers members because we wanted them to feel like they were part of what we were doing. Early on, we created something called the Ideas Portal, which was actually within our application, and they could actually submit ideas of what they thought the most important things that were that we needed to enhance our product. And it was open source, so people could actually vote things up or down. And the theory was that we would kind of carve off the things at the top of the list that most people had voted for and really put some effort into building building those. We've obviously, you know, advanced our, our contact with our customers overall. Our product team is very involved in many aspects of dealing with our customers, including creating an advisory group in different sort of cohorts within our platform of the types of users. And so, you know, whether it's analytics or if it's our billing platform, having other subject matter experts that can contribute pre-product, so during the build phase, to really give us understanding that yes, we are building the right thing and we are making it most efficient possible. Because, you know, in the world of EHR and EMR, efficiency absolutely has to be the name of the game for adoption and continued usage. So product, you know, is at the sort of, focal point of that involvement with the customer. But we don't stop there. We think that, you know, in order to build great software, you really have to have a deep understanding of our— of your customer. And so we instituted internally something we call our Member Moonwalk, which essentially is a goal for every employee within the organization, especially our developers, to actually spend to spend a day at a clinic understanding and seeing our platform in action. You know, when you have a mission-critical application, it is critical for people to understand how it's being used on a daily basis and what happens if it's not functioning the way it's supposed to function. And so that's been a sort of a strategic goal, actually, for us from a culture perspective of making sure that we have our employees out there and in the trenches understanding how our product's being used and what it means to our customers. And then finally, I would just say, you know, Nancy mentioned it when she came on board. Truly understanding the customer means creating processes internally that meet your customer needs and demands. You know, when we again first started going out and looking for funding, everybody wants to amplify your sales strategy, right? How can you sell more products? And the first thing, you know, you bring in your playbook on sales, and it's usually cold calling. Well, in the SMB space within physical therapy, most of the owners are actually operators as well, so they're treating patients all day. You're not going to get to a decision maker by making a cold call. And so we had established ways of, you know, meeting them where they are at, whether it was through continuing education or at trade shows, things like that where we could generate leads. But, you know, at the end of the day, it was really about listening and understanding your customer. That has really led us and been a foundation of our success.

I love the member moonwalk because not all of our employees are as dedicated as I am to get hurt, generate a need for physical therapy, so it's the next best thing.

All right, and just one thing I was gonna add, Heidi, I think you guys also have a fairly large number of product managers who have experience as rehab therapists as well.

Yeah, that's something we've really developed as we've come along in our, in our product team to look for specific experience, whether it's been athletic training or actual physical therapists that have been a part of our product management team, has been tremendous. And as Nancy, Nancy will talk about later in terms of our M&A strategy, one of the really cool things that we've been able to do is have other acquisitions and products that have actually been developed within our industry that we've been able to bring under the WebPT PT umbrella, and those therapists have, are now part of the WebPT team, and I've embraced obviously them as the original founder, but embraced them, and we've created something we call the Founders Collective within, within our organization, which I think is super cool because we all have this interesting domain expertise. We're different ages, and really it brings a lot of value to the organization to see us as therapists being able to give feedback and, um, you know, create more ideas for better products.

Okay, fascinating. Um, I think that's a good transition to the next lesson, which is align with investors who have deep vertical expertise. And I don't want to talk too much about battery, but obviously we've done a lot of healthcare IT deals. We're a firm that has done a zillion software as a service deals in the past, so obviously it seemed like a good fit for us. But, you know, Nancy, you weren't at the company company in 2014 when we first partnered together. Heidi, you were there. Um, do you want to just talk about that process a little bit? Because I know for many people in the audience, obviously finding the right investor is critical.

So as I mentioned before, we were bootstrapped. Um, we started building in 2006, we launched the company in 2008, um, and we were profitable, uh, with— by 2009, we had a million-dollar run rate by 2010. Some compliance and factors had added fuel to our fire in terms of more people wanting to adopt, and we saw this opportunity to grow faster, but we needed capital. And so in 2010, we decided to go out in Phoenix to do an angel round funding, and we found a partner, Canal Partners, who was led— that was led by Jim Armstrong, who was the founder of JDA Software. Uh, one of the largest point-of-sale services in the world, uh, platforms in the world. Uh, he joined our board, and what we were looking for at that point in time was SaaS experience, but also, um, expertise in how to scale, uh, because we knew if we were gonna do what we, we had wanted to do and really truly disrupt the industry, we needed to be able to scale our platform. Uh, and so we did. We took $1 million in at that point, um, and turned that $1 million into $17 million in 2 years. And as— and our metrics were off the charts. And as you can imagine, you know, I don't know how they do it, but venture capital always finds you even when you're in Phoenix. And so they came and started knocking on our door and taking a lot of interest in what we were doing. And we actually got to know Battery in around 2011 or so. And actually, they courted us for quite a long time. We kept saying no, no, no, and they said, well, we can help, let us help you. And they sure enough, they did. They made really great introductions, and we did start a process in 2014, and ultimately Battery did win the deal, and we did an institutional round with Battery Ventures in 2014. And at that point, you know, our thesis was really around— we had obviously significantly grown But this was how do we take the company to the next level? How do we really grow? We had, you know, we had crossed the 100-employee barrier, but we really wanted to scale to get to that, you know, $50-100 million mark. And so looking for domain expertise and also obviously having Chelsea talk to us about the BrightTree playbook that they had done really helped to to solidify our understanding that, yeah, this is going to be the right partner to take us to that next level. Not only that, but just their discipline overall of, you know, just the business practices and also letting us continue to be operators. And I will just say that their belief in our vision and hanging around for so long really made us understand that they truly were interested in what our opportunity was going to be. and being able to stay very, very clearly focused in the, in the rehab therapy industry, all led to, you know, our great partnership with Battery.

And how many, I think we've talked about this before, how many investors did you talk to? It was quite a few, right?

We actually went through, through two processes.

Wow.

With, uh, Battery making it to the finals the first time. We got valuation stars in our eyes the first time, but walked away at the altar, uh, because at the end of the day, we do have a very strong culture at WebPT. With a set of core values that truly is the foundation of our company. And we took a step back. It just didn't feel right the first time, and we walked away. And that was a big decision for the organization. And about 8 months later, we decided to go out with a process. And we went to probably 100 dinners. Like, we had a— we had investment banker, but it was— we just kind kind of just wanted to understand the landscape a lot more. Uh, the second time around was a much shorter process. We were very focused in, in the people that we had liked previously that we brought back to the table. Um, and also made the decision, which was different from the first, to actually give up control of the company. So we gave up 51% of the company. Um, we were, as founders, able to take some liquidity off the table, uh, which really allowed us to be a lot less risky risk-averse in making decisions and really being able to swing to the fences as we've done, and it's, it's paid off.

Yeah, definitely. Well, I think I want to bring the conversation back to another theme that has come up a couple times, which is expertise. You know, domain expertise, expertise by the company, expertise by your investor. And naturally, there's a lot of knowledge and expertise internalized, you know, within your company. And I think that is something that we wanted to talk about as far as lesson number 6, which is lead your industry, don't just sell them software. So can either of you maybe share with us how the team at WebPT kind of turned that internal expertise into a real engine to drive growth for the company?

Well, I'll kick it off. I mean, from the very, very beginning, being a physical therapy— it's my industry that we were trying to disrupt and we were trying to make changes in. And as I even recall back when we were truly trying to you know, write down the vision of what we wanted to build with WebPT on the back of that ATM envelope back in 2007, it included advocacy. It included this, you know, thought leadership sort of, hey, we need to put this out there because in general, physical therapists are not recognized for their expertise in the greater healthcare industry landscape. And so, you know, we have a brand problem if you will, and so getting the physical therapy name out there to help increase the volume of patients would only help us in the long run because we would get more clinics that would have to open up to, to serve those patients. And so when we took our first round of funding in, in 2010, we committed to a marketing strategy that really solidified that thought leadership in terms of content marketing and digital marketing, and we started flooded the internet with blogs, we did free webinars, and we did all kinds of content out there to really under— to help people understand more about what we were doing, because there wasn't a lot of understanding around the business side of physical therapy in general. And so today we're actually the third most sought-after resource behind the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, and and the American Physical Therapy Association with any keywords that have to do with physical therapy. So all of that has really helped us again when, as a brand, that a known entity within the system, within our industry. So anytime, even if you aren't looking for an EMR today, when you're ready, we want to be the first thing that comes off of your, in your mind, as to, hey, they're at least the person I should go to first. And I— Nancy can, can attest to, as we've now moved up market, that has helped tremendously in terms of the brand recognition and understanding what we've done for the industry.

Yeah, I sometimes think Heidi created two companies, you know, the commercial software company and this incredible industry advocacy company, and it's really been a big part of our success. She mentioned some of the tactics but not some of the numbers that that really blew me away when I was looking at joining the company. You know, we get over 7 million web hits a year. Webinars in enterprise, if you get 300 people to come to a webinar, that's amazing. We get 35,000 people a year. So the impact of WebPT as an advocate for our industry, I think, is really impressive. I mean, now we started the WebPT Foundation even to build on that. But when I came in, one of my charters was to help the company go upmarket towards enterprise, you know, my sweet spot, and so I was able to take what Heidi had started and just augment it. For example, for all that's a $33 billion industry, there's not a lot of good business information available on it, so we started the first annual State of Rehab Therapy Report. Our marketing team puts a lot into it. Chelsea, when she saw it last time, said, "Wow, you could charge thousands of dollars per person for. This year we expect to have about 10,000 respondents, and it creates a profile of our industry, of demographics, of trends, concerns, of course technology adoption, etc., that no one else has. And so it put us on the, the mind map of C-suite executives at these larger companies. The second thing is, Heidi mentioned briefly, I told you before that she started a thought leadership conference 5 years ago called Ascend. I was really happy to hear Nick Mehta at Gainsight talk about his Pulse conference, 'cause we really did something similar. So not a clinical conference, there are plenty of those, but a business conference for larger enterprises. This year we tried 2 new things that I was really excited about. We created an invitation-only club called the Executive Summit that met the day before. We invited only the largest operators, and that was fun because we don't know all the largest operators coming from SMB. So our marketing team created this really beautiful bespoke physical invitation gift box that went to all the industry thought leaders with our survey, with other information about the company. We worked the phones and we were able to convene over 50% of the large operators to come meet and not to sell them anything, but to talk about the state of the industry. Um, that executive summit we've taken on the road now. We have executive summit dinners, uh, in major cities about every 6 weeks. And then with, uh, Becky's help, we tried something yet again new, which is reaching out to the investors in the clinic side. So today there are over 20 private equity investors active in buying up clinics, buying up these SMB businesses, and aggregating them into larger chains. And so these are the board members and investors of the people we want to sell to. We partnered with Battery, and at an industry investment conference, we invited those 20 investors to come to breakfast with us, and working together, we got 80% of them to come. And so think about the power of that, being able to speak to the board boardroom of the people we want to sell to and certainly leave them with a good impression of WebPT, but also to advance themes that we think will double or triple our whole industry to everybody's behalf. So that's been a really cool journey, building on that SMB thought leadership and taking it upmarket.

Exactly, and I did want to just double-click for a minute on the big industry report that Nancy mentioned, the State of Rehab Therapy. I think no matter what your industry, doing these kinds these kinds of deep dive research projects can pay dividends on a number of levels. I mean, I'm a marketer, so I think also from a PR and a comms perspective, journalists are much more likely to want to write about interesting industry data than they are about company-specific marketing pitches, you know, and that's something you got. So you were able to leverage this, I think, through multiple channels, right?

Well, such a good point. Two things that we had a spotlight on this year were we created the first pay guide for a whole industry, because PayScale and tools like that don't follow physical therapists. Number one most downloaded thing we've created, but it put a spotlight on the gender gap in pay, and that's a theme that journalists will pick up and run with. The second general theme we created was the crisis in student debt, right? Over $100,000 to get a doctorate in physical therapy versus what you can make. So using that to create this bridge to a broader market. The third is the opioid crisis, which we might get around to talking about. Absolutely.

Yeah, it's a super, super effective marketing strategy. I think you guys have been very astute with marketing. I think positioning, you know, positioning yourself in the industry is a core part of that, but I think after you guys established your core position, it strikes me that, you know, one of the things you did next was look at expanding your market share beyond just selling to your core customers, and that is lesson number 7, which is develop channels to expand market share. So Nancy, why don't you give us your thoughts on this one?

Channels have been huge for us, and I think they're huge for any company as a way to amplify your reach, amplify your selling effort at a very low price point. My only word of caution is to focus on ones that are really going to move the needle. It's easy to do partnerships that result in a press release but don't generate any revenue. So really think quality and go after the people that are hard to catch, frankly. So at WebPT, we have 3 kinds of partnerships. The first is around data. Patients move around the healthcare system, and everyone's frustrated by the clipboards. Why don't you know all this information about me? So we do consider it part of our duty, frankly, to take the data we have and move it around and let it follow the patient across the healthcare ecosystem. System. Also because we're the market leader, if anyone wants to sell to physical therapists, we have 40% of the market, they want to partner with us. So we have a really robust data ecosystem. We're a very open company, and so we have about 7,000 data interfaces running every day, and we have been able to monetize those over time too, which has been cool. Second, co-selling partnerships. Who is where you want to be? Our case, there's a very cool company called Modernizing Medicine that is a leader in selling software to orthopedic practices. Well, orthopods generate a lot of referrals to physical therapy. You go in for a hip or knee replacement, you go in with a sports in the industry, they're gonna refer you over. And so we were able to forge a joint offering so that when a big orthopedic practice who also has physical therapy is making a software decision, they can have the best of breed for both sides and a really, really deep integration. And the third, which is kind of interesting for a SaaS company, we have a distribution partnership. So physical therapy clinics buy a lot of physical goods. They buy tables, they buy capital equipment, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So we partnered with one of those companies that has more than 140 feet on the street on the street going in and out of clinics every day, and they're now carrying us with them. And so as a SaaS company selling still to a lot of SMB, having that physical footprint has been really a game changer for us.

Right. And I think you wanted to talk about network partners too, right?

Oh, and just, there is a stat that I'm obsessed with, and that's the fact that 90% of the people who would benefit from physical therapy every year 100 million Americans don't ever go to physical therapy. Instead, they sit at home, they take ibuprofen, they get on opioids, imaging, surgery. 100 million people there we need to serve. So I'm working on partnerships now to sort of go out in the world and see, well, who aggregates those people? So insurance companies, large employers, and how can we create a relationship in which they educate those individuals about the value of physical therapy and steer them to physical therapy and steer them differentially to WebPT customers. Because then people will buy us not only for our amazing software, but because we can change their fundamental business dynamics. Super cool.

Alright, I think we have about 5 minutes left, so that's good timing for our final lesson and then a wrap-up, which is know when to grow through M&A. This has been a real driver of of growth for you guys. So maybe tell us how, both how you approached it at a high level, and then tactically how you executed on that.

The first thing I will tell everybody is that M&A can be a game changer. I've done 15 deals, I think, over my career, and they've all been really additive. But the important thing is to have a thoughtful, purposeful strategy. It's easy to be reactive. Bankers show up all the time. They have a book. You get excited. You get in the competitive spray, but you end up buying the wrong things and paying too much. You need to be like Battery, you need to build a pipeline, relationships that you patiently nurture for years because you understand what they're gonna do for the company. So for us, there were two themes we wanted to address through M&A. One is that the number one reason we lose customers is they're purchased by someone else. I mentioned those 20 PE firms rolling up clients clinics, so the market was getting big fast, and we needed to keep up and scale up. And what was really important for me is to have a portfolio that every single person wanted to do business with us. And this is a challenge when you have the core workflow product like an EMR, because once you have one, you don't wake up every day thinking you want to switch to a different one. And so when I came in and I started knocking on that enterprise which is not where WebPT started, the conversation went something like this: "Nice to meet you. Of course I know WebPT. WebPT is awesome, but I'm not looking to switch my EMR. Goodbye." Click. Super dissatisfying. So we set out through M&A to acquire products that would work with anybody's EMR, so that everybody in the industry would want to do business with us, and we bought this lovely company company, 5 guys, a girl, and a dog named Lucy, who were EMR agnostic and already selling to those guys. The second thing is when you're in a vertical, you need to be over 50% market share as fast as possible. You need to race to the top, and we were getting there, you know, really well on our own, but we were able to buy a major competitor, someone we had been wooing for a few years, and coming together, it gave us a lot of great employees, which we needed for growth. It gave us great customers at the higher end of our market, and it really finished out this end-to-end platform that we needed. So M&A has been crucial. We've more than doubled the company in the 2 years since I joined, and we're now knocking on that magic number of $100 million of ARR.

Oh, wow. Okay. I was going to ask about any other specific metrics when you think about just overall how successful that's been for you. That's strategy. Okay, great. Well, I think in some, I want to kind of take it back to the founder, which is Heidi, who started this like growth machine that, as we now said, is actually pushing $100 million in ARR. When we think through these 8 lessons that we've talked about, which of the ones are most resonant for you, maybe that are most salient, you think, to, to the audience of people who have maybe smaller companies now, $10, $20 million in ARR, and they're trying to grow?

Yeah, I mean, trying to narrow those 8 down to a few, I think the 3 most important, if I had, if I was you and you're, see, taking it away, would really be the first being super disciplined and focused on your industry sort of narrowness. Trying to do too much for too many, it's very easily, easy to get distracted when people come to you and say, oh, this is really cool, what if it did this? Have a very clear plan and strategy of how you want to grow and, and be disciplined enough to stick to that as you continue to get successes. So that would be the first one, is really staying just very disciplined. The second one would be the choosing your right partners and leaders. You know, we didn't talk too much about culture during this session, but That has been one of the foundations of our organization and helped us with our core values within the organization to make decisions with those in mind, not only from an M&A and strategic planning, but definitely from partnership and leadership folks coming into the team. So, you know, we didn't just bring in Battery and, you know, an amazing CEO like Nancy just because of their expertise expertise and experience. It was a lot more about them matching up with our core values of who we are as an organization, but also the belief in our vision of what we wanted to do. It's amazing just even sitting here, I've heard Nancy talk many, many times and we talk all the time in turn inside the company, but the passion that she now has for the rehab therapy industry when she had no domain expertise expertise coming into this 2.5 years ago still gives me chills. And when I hear support people on the phone talking, you know, with more expertise sometimes than even the provider on the other side of the phone is what has really, again, you know, been not only just a game changer for us internally, but also what differentiates us from any of our competitors. Right. And then finally, I would, I would just say the establishment of the brand and the thought leadership. You know, for us, having that foundation of going into any conversation and somebody already have heard our name and understand that we are more than just an EMR company, understanding that we are standing with them as far as advocacy for the industry, that we, you know, and even internally, that we have this true driving purpose and north star that we're Trying to tackle that 90% and create more benefit for everyone is truly meaningful to us as a brand, but also from a recruiting standpoint and all other aspects of the business, it's really paid dividends in terms of starting that out from the beginning. So it's been an awesome ride.

Those are great takeaways.

All right.

Well, both of you, it's so impressive what you've built. Thank you for the knowledge.

Thank you.

Thanks, everybody.