This is Rachel Feller, co-host of The Pulse Podcast. Today’s guest is Sam Scheer, CEO of Yes Hearing. Founded in 2019, Yes Hearing is an online provider of hearing care and hearing aids, partnering with over 400 audiology providers to provide in-home services such as phone and video consultations, hearing tests, hearing aid fitting, programming, and follow-up care. Through their unique model, audiologists and hearing specialists bring the clinic directly to patients’ living rooms. The company is now the largest in-home hearing care provider in the world. The company was founded in 2019 and secured its $10 million Series A funding in 2022. In this episode, I spoke with Sam about his path towards founding Yes Hearing, learned about the company’s mission and business model, and took a deep dive into the broader hearing care and at-home health ecosystem. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Sam, thank you so much for joining me on The Pulse Podcast today. How are you? Really well, thank you. How are you? Doing great. Excited to dive into this with you. We have a tradition of asking our guests on The Pulse, this icebreaker, what did you want to be when you grew up? Probably when I was very young, a soccer player, a football player in England, would have been the dream that got crushed pretty early on. I also had a fascination with being a garbage man and an astronaut like everyone else, less the garbage man, more the astronaut, but yeah, I think that was a whole load of things growing up. Well, then I’d love to hear what made you decide to enter the hearing space with Yes Hearing. Could you share with us a bit about your background and how you decided to enter it in the U.S. market, especially since I know that you’re from London? Yeah, for sure. I mean, grew up in London and that is most people’s question. How is it that someone in their late twenties is in the U.S. hearing market from London, but always had a fascination with the U.S., traveled a lot and growing up was really aware of it. I went to college. I studied geography with economics. A lot of it was about aging population and aging studies, then had a real interest in startups. I worked at a social recommendation startup straight out of college that was a friend of mine’s business. Amazing idea of like, you trust your friends more than you trust strangers online, and that was a really, really good experience. And then I worked at Howes in the U.K. as they were expanding across the U.K. and Europe and was working with their sales and marketing teams. And then my entry into hearing was very random and not expected. But my grandmother was very ill with dementia at the time. And I started really thinking about how one dementia is probably the worst disease you can have. And I really saw with her how it doesn’t just affect her as an individual, but the whole family, me, my parents, my grandfather. It’s a really debilitating disease, obviously. But it made me think about aging and made me think about connectivity with dementia. And it’s where I learned that hearing is directly related to hearing loss and dementia directly correlated. And actually, as you think about it, people are getting older, and the only way that your quality of life is truly there is if you have connection, is my view. And I really started thinking about, well, how can we look at hearing loss as a factor? I remember going to visit her in the home and they would play things like music to trigger memories. And someone at the time said something about how, well, for me, there was a hearing aid to listen to it. And it really stuck with me that it’s such a solvable thing. And it’s not necessarily like, oh, if you get a hearing aid, you’re never going to get dementia, but it can really improve your quality of life. So for me, my background was take what I’d learned at college, take my experience of traveling to the US. And I looked at the UK market, which was way ahead of the US at the time. And I said, most people actually in the UK start a business with the goal of expanding to the US. But why not just skip the step and go straight to the biggest market, go straight to where the majority of the people are and actually make a difference in a healthcare ecosystem that was behind where the UK was. It’s great to hear that you had a personal story that shaped the trajectory of your business. And I completely agree with you that it’s often overlooked how many impacts hearing has on other parts of our health. So I’m excited to dive into that with you a little bit deeper in a bit. But first, I’d love to understand a bit more about the company itself. Can you explain for us at a high level what Yes Hearings offerings provide? And what were the main pain points you were hoping to solve through your solution? I think if we look back, I’ve been doing this for four years. And in that time, the markets changed a lot. Traditionally, the way you buy a hearing aid is through either a large retailer or a single store location. You also have people like Costco, but typically it’s very held in a local environment where you have a specific amount of products. The pricing is often non-transparent. It can be incredibly expensive in cities, and typically it’s different across the board. And what I felt was that most people weren’t looking to actually go. There’s a huge stigma behind hearing. There’s a huge barrier to ever addressing it. Most people wait up to seven years before they make a decision. And when you think about how the actual product distribution is held in these centers, it just wasn’t appealing to most people for a product they already didn’t want. And then over the period of time, the market was shifting at the same time. So you had the rise of online access, you had the rise of personal sound amplifiers, of new direct-to-consumer e-commerce companies. And the way I looked at the market was twofold. You could have really good products at the clinic level and amazing levels of care that would really actually help you use the hearing aid, get the best out of it, but the cost and the access were prohibitive, and so most people didn’t go for it. The alternative is you buy online and you can get it for a much lower price, but you get very limited care. And actually what you see a lot of is people buy a hearing aid and then they leave it in their drawer and don’t actually use it. And so what I looked at was how can you combine the best of both and create a whole new way to buy a hearing aid that is through a distribution channel that is very different. So what we built was the bridge between the online-only e-commerce model with the clinic model. And instead of working with clinics, we took the clinician out of the clinic and do the service in-home. And the way it works typically is we have a website, so it’s yeshearing.com. People will come to the website, they have a full consultation through either a phone or a video call with one of our specialists, we have a full call center. We do a full lifestyle assessment, we’ll decide based on your lifestyle, based on your needs what we think is right for you. And then we have 600 audiologists and hearing specialists across the country that are fully mobile and will go into the home to do a full hearing assessment, hearing fitting, programming. We do things like test against background noise and we have the spouse speak and we do sound in garden and we can turn your TV on. So it’s a really personal experience at a much lower cost with the best products. I imagine the personalization element and the shift towards at-home is really critical towards adoption and accessibility. So it’s great to hear you’re implementing that. I’m curious what ultimately made you decide to go with the at-home business model? And did you have any major challenges implementing this? There were a couple of things. I mean, obviously in-home is becoming more of a trend. And so I think a lot of people are looking at the home as kind of the center of where people live and they spend their time. My co-founder, Oliver, his grandmother also had dementia, which is how we went to school together and we knew each other growing up. And we both looked at the same problem and she had a lot of her service in home. So that made us really think about, okay, well, why wouldn’t you have more service in home? And then there was a company in the UK that was very small that did offer in-home service and I tried it out and I thought, wow, this is such a no brainer because I can take the clinician out of the clinic. They’re earning more money. They want flexible hours. If you look at the makeup of often who is in the audiology industry, it’s primarily female. Often they work part time. There is a desire for flexible work and ultimately they’re there to help people. They want to provide care more than they want to sell. So that was something we really focused on. And then it was a challenge. We did really start growing in the middle of COVID, literally at the start of COVID. We were the growing in-home provider. And so you would think logically that’s a recipe for disaster, but actually it really worked well for us because there was nowhere else to go. And so while people were sheltered at home, we would have our COVID policies and everything else. But actually there was a real desire to get out and to provide service for the audiologists where often the clinics were closed. It’s great that your solution doubled as a source of work for audiologists during the pandemic. And I imagine the pandemic really accelerated your business. What factors does Yes Hearing take into account when selecting the right hearing aid for the right patient and how are hearing aids overall integrated as part of your platform? So hearing is essential to it. The whole point of the business is really, can we get the right people into the right products because the right product is going to actually be the thing that changes their quality of life. Typically when you look at the hearing market as a whole, it is quite commodified. There’s not much of a difference between the different products at the top level, at the mid level, at the basic level. The manufacturers all offer slightly different benefits, but it’s then about matching features to lifestyle typically. So if I was to do a hearing assessment, if I was to do a consultation, it’s very similar to anything else that you would be doing consultation for. But what is your daily activity like? Do you work? Are you in an office? How many times a week do you go out? Do you go to the theater? Do you have young grandchildren? Do you watch a lot of TV? Do you have a need when you travel? And all of these factors come into essentially a decision tree, which is what level is right for you? At the highest level, it has the most automated features. And so if you’re active, that’s really what you should have. And then it’s about rechargeability, batteries, what your family think you need, what you think you need. And it becomes quite logical after a period of time. Once you really understand someone’s needs, it’s very clear which product will be best. What is the process of understanding those patient needs and providing any follow-up care or addressing their concerns after the initial visit? So the first step is the online assessments, the phone call or the video call. And then we do the first in-home visit. So we’ll send the hearing specialist to the house. They’ll do a full assessment. They ask a lot more follow-up questions. They can really look around the house, speak to the wife or the husband or the kids that are there too, and find out a lot more information. And then what we do is we leave the hearing aids after the first visit. It takes about two weeks to adjust to the new sound. So hearing is very different to glasses. I wear contacts, and I just stick them in, and suddenly I can see. With hearing, it’s a totally different sound profile, very different experience. You have to adapt to it, and your brain needs to adapt. So we leave it for two weeks, and then we come back again. We go back to the house, and we make adjustments there and then in the home. Typically what you find is people need to adjust the sound. They want it louder. They realize that it’s amazing when they’re at home, but when they go to a restaurant, it needs more background adjustment. And so that’s really what it comes to. It’s a lot of trial and error, and that’s why I think the physical in-person care is so critical for the success, because that first, say, 15 days to up to 50 days is critical in whether people are going to continue to use it. Who is the primary patient that you target? What is that overall demographic like? And does it tend to be a higher acuity patient segment or just the general population that may be hard of hearing? There’s a few different types. So I think one of the interesting things is we have a younger demographic. Our average age is 66, which is quite significantly lower than the average age of a hearing aid adopter, which is about 71, 72. And the whole goal for us is it’s obviously suited to people that are bed-bound, people that can’t leave the house, but actually what we’re trying to do is reduce that seven-year gap from when you know that you have a hearing loss to when you actually do something about it. And so what we’re getting to is the people that are maybe one year in or within a year of actually thinking about it and saying, OK, well, at the very least, let’s send someone to you. We’ll do a hearing assessment. And if you have a hearing loss, we’ll find you a solution. And so I think it is a general solution for most people. It’s definitely designed for those that need more support, that want more care, that really want the best out of their hearing, that have maybe tried another option, haven’t been successful. That’s where we do the best. I think that’s where we have the most impact. I’m interested to understand, especially with the introduction of over-the-counter hearing aids, how, if at all, has that impacted either your business model or the patient demographic? Because from what I understand, increasing numbers of patients who wouldn’t otherwise have turned to a hearing aid may see that as an option for them. Yeah, it’s still so early, but I mean, overall, OTC is so exciting. It’s the most exciting change in hearing in like 50 years plus. So it is opening up a whole new world. There’s so much more awareness about it now. There’s so much more knowledge on what hearing loss is, on the things I mentioned about my grandmother. You know, this is now becoming a common conversation. So I think OTC is going to be the best thing that’s ever happened to the hearing industry. And then what you’ll see gradually and what we’re seeing already is that you get natural selection. So a lot of people will think they’re a candidate for OTC. They may try it. And then the goal for us is that what we don’t want to happen is they try the OTC and then they delay another five years before they do anything because it didn’t work. What we want to do is work with OTC vendors. We want to work with our marketing, with our content to say to people, well, look, if OTC wasn’t a right fit because, you know, the sound threshold didn’t go high enough because it didn’t do the benefit for you, then come to us and we can give you a prescription hearing aid at a much higher level. So the impact so far has been there’s definitely a lot more research happening online. There’s a lot more traffic online about hearing aids. There’s a lot more coverage into it. So we’re seeing a general population increase. There’s definitely confusion in the market. So what we’re trying to do is bridge that confusion, break through it, break through the noise and really give people independent good advice. But the effects are still so early that we’re going to have to wait and see. It’s very exciting that this shift towards over-the-counter hearing aids came at a time that your business could make the most of. And I love to hear that you are partnering with some of those over-the-counter vendors as a way to increase awareness and access if that doesn’t provide the right solution for the patient. From a strategic perspective, and again, you started elaborating on this a bit upfront, but what would you say differentiates YesHearing from other hearing solutions on the market? I think it’s really simple. I think that we’re the only in-home company at scale. So we’re the largest, I think, in the world now with the number of providers we have, the number of visits we’ve done. And that in-home is very unique and very difficult to replicate if it took us three years to get to where we are. We’re also completely independent, which is very rare in the hearing industry. Most vendors, distributors, manufacturers are all vertically integrated. And so we’re a real independent player in the market. And I think that that’s a very good difference in that we don’t gain anything from recommending one product over another. It’s really just about what is right for you. Touching on the over-the-counter shift or the shift towards increasing at-home health overall, what do you see as the key expansion opportunities for YesHearing down the road? I think that we’re barely scratching the surface of where we can be in just the space we’re at now. So just the online awareness and, again, finding those people that aren’t maybe suited to either the clinic or to the OTC market and seeing how we can serve them. I think we’re so small when you think there’s 2 million hearing aids sold a year. And at the scale we’re at, we’re really not scratching the surface right now. So a lot of room to grow there. But we’re also looking actively at partnerships. We’re looking at the insurance space, at the payer market. Again, it’s a very unique proposition to have someone in the home. And so when you couple that with a hearing benefit to say, well, can we look at social determinants of health? Can we be doing screeners in the home? And we’ve developed a whole program called Say Yes, which is screen, assess, and intervene. And so we’re looking at insurance a lot. But then it’s also about partnerships with other vendors, other home care providers, primary care physicians, golf clubs, opticians. There’s so many routes for us to market that we’re looking really across the board. But partnerships would definitely be a big form of our strategy moving forward. Very interesting hearing you mention social determinants of health. And I’d love to understand how you think about assessing social determinants of health as part of broader patient care during the home visit. Do you make referrals to other forms of care or perhaps enter the patient into occupational therapy for their hearing? How does that tend to work? So I think we’re in a really privileged position in being in the home. And again, we’ve been doing this in the direct-to-consumer space for so long that translating it over to the payer space is very simple overall because we have all the ingredients. But what we think about is we’re in the home for a long period of time. And I think we have a unique opportunity to be screening for things like full risk, for behavioral health, for using standard CDC steady initiatives, which is about full prevention for older adults. Can we do balance testing? But it can be also about things like, are the lights off everywhere? Are there cables running through the corridor that are going to be a trip hazard? Is there clearly a sign of early onset dementia? And that’s where we’re training our providers to be really assessing what they’re seeing and then seeing how we can be the referrers back to the plans or back to a primary care physician or back to another company to say, how can you help this person? We’ve seen that their heating’s at 112 and that they haven’t made any steps today. And we should get them a fitness coach. And so we’re not actually stepping in to do the program. But I think the hearing is a key part of those social determinants of health. But it’s only one part of the picture. So that’s where we’re combining it all together. You touched on both payers and recruiting of your audiologists. And I’d love to circle back to both of those elements in a moment. But you also mentioned something interesting, which is that the inner ear is not just a center of hearing, but also a center of balance, which I think many people, including myself, often overlook. How have you thought about the linkage between hearing and mobility, dementia and fall prevention, et cetera, in designing a holistic solution? Yeah, it’s so interlinked. I mean, it is directly related. Hearing is often seen, and I think this is where part of the stigma and part of what I think OTC is going to open up. People connect hearing with just the ability to hear, but it’s so much more than that. It does dictate how your brain functions, how you’re able to process sound, process information, communicate, empathize, really engage with someone else. It also affects things like balance. It affects things like how active you are generally in your life. And so there’s these vicious cycles that occur. If you take out one of your key senses, which is hearing, take that out and you will see these cycles continue to occur across the board. And so what we’re looking at is we can provide the hearing aid and then our job is to ensure that you continue to use the hearing aid. And from there, if you continue to use the hearing aid, we’re going to track and make sure that this is actually giving you a benefit for your life. So it’s really interconnected with everything else. And I think that that’s where we have quite a key role in the whole ecosystem to say we’re actually the caregiver, but we’re also the provider of the hearing aid itself. I’m excited to continue learning more about the inner ear and all the linkages it has to broader health, especially as someone who has dealt with a hearing condition myself. And I’m excited for our listeners to understand a bit more about that as well. So thank you for sharing that with us. I’d now like to circle back towards the health plan aspect. So how do you go about pitching a value proposition to health plans to secure reimbursement for this solution and overall make it accessible to patients? It’s been a major learning curve, obviously coming from the UK where we have the NHS and learning about Medicare Advantage and Medicare programs. I mean, it’s really an incredible world of complexity and governance and politics. But it’s been really exciting. And what I do at the moment, I’ve been going to lots of conferences. I was in New Orleans early this week at a conference about Medicare Advantage, understanding the compliance program stars, what truly matters to the plan and to the members. And then it’s just about how we are a very unique proposition. I truly view us as non-competitive with most of the market because we stand alone. And so when I look at the plan, I talk to them and I say, well, you know, you have a hearing benefit. Your utilization may be low, but what if we could get your utilization up because we go to the home so we can meet the most at risk members? And then what if this actually is going to improve your full risk measures? And then you’re going to see a massive reduction in your own cost as a plan over time because your members are healthier, they’re more active, they’re more engaged. And so I think that’s where we’re very different from the status quo in the hearing benefit market. And then in terms of actually pitching to the plans, once we pitch, it’s really exciting. It’s a long process. It takes a year to two years plus to get these plans on board in a lot of cases. But for us at the moment, it’s a really good position and we’re having good success early on in the market. That’s great to hear. How do you think about measuring clinical outcomes and what specifically does Yes Hearing look at to measure the efficacy of care? In the early periods, what you look at mainly is usage. You look at NPS, so Net Promoted Score from the individuals. What do they think of their care provider, customer service of the hearing device itself? We look at how many adjustments do they need? Are they actually continuing to use those hearing aids? And then in terms of full risk and dementia prevention, that does take time to see. You’re not going to see that in the first year. You’re going to see that gradually. But our view fundamentally is if we can help you to actually continue wearing that device, if you’re happy with it, if it’s doing what you need it to do and you’re confident that you’re wearing it pretty much every day, then we’re in a really strong position to actually improve the overall quality of life over time. I’m sure that payers love hearing that holistic story about patient care beyond hearing as part of the value proposition. I’d also love to understand how you train and recruit your audiologists and what the arrangement is with these audiologists and hearing specialists. Do they work for Yes Hearing full time or on a contractual basis? So we’ve been doing recruiting. We started back in 2019. We started just in New York City, in Long Island. We had our first providers in Long Island and it really grew rapidly a lot through word of mouth. We had an amazing internal recruiter that would work with clinicians and work with organizations to help us source clinicians. But again, the demand has kind of been twofold. The demand has been from the individuals themselves for wanting this. But I think for the clinician themselves, for the hearing specialists, they want to do this, too. They want to help people. It’s a unique model. It’s flexible work. We look after them. We make sure that they know what they’re doing. And then it’s a massive amount of training continuously. And so I think when you look at it, we’re training them not so much on how to be a great audiologist, but the softer skills, things like bedside manner, communication, patient experience, the entering into someone’s home. It’s a very private space. So how do you behave differently in that environment compared to how you would do in a clinic? Also, some of the services we’re providing are very different. So connecting to a TV, there’s a much more tech component to this in terms of how you do a remote assessment. We have amazing remote audiology kits and equipment and everything like that. But it’s about the training overall of is the patient getting a good experience? And if they are, then we’ve done our job. And so, yeah, I think there’s a flywheel effect now into the recruiting. And actually what you reach is a critical number where it’s about how many providers are really, really strong. How do you make them really strong? How do you grow that core of the group? But also, how does the wider network function well as a whole? As part of providing that overall patient experience and entering the home, especially since you are stepping into a very private part of a person’s life, are there any steps that you take in training to make your audiologist more culturally competent or perhaps overcome language barriers that may exist since patients may be hard of hearing? Yes, there’s a lot that goes into that. So if you think about it, from the moment they call in and every contact begins on the phone, so we do know a fair amount from the very first call. We then have a patient coordination team and a customer service team. And so what they’re doing is they’re gathering a lot of information before that first visit. If we notice something, if we find out about an earwax issue, if we see that there may be a cultural barrier, if there’s something specific about the home, if there’s something specific about the person, we’ll often do two things. One is provide as much information to the provider ahead of time so they know what to do, what they’re going to overcome, what they need to work with. And two, we encourage family member involvement across the board. So I think it’s all about having the key stakeholders, aside from just the person getting the hearing aid, actually as a part of wanting to improve that overall care, the benefit of the hearing aid and everything else. So we don’t offer language classes, but we do look for bilingual providers and that’s harder to find. I think in most cases, it’s just the case of we’ll only provide care to someone we know we can help. It’s great to hear that you do layer in the family members and the surrounding ecosystem of the patient into the patient journey, because as I’m sure you experienced firsthand with your grandmother, it can be very difficult to connect the elderly with the right solutions in a technology driven environment. I’m also curious to understand what barriers to adoption you faced and focusing specifically on patient adoption and barriers to access, whether it may be financial or material, any way you can elaborate on that? Yeah, there’s so many. I mean, there’s so many structural barriers. Hearing aids are very expensive. Even at the lower end, you’re still looking at a thousand dollars minimum price in most cases for a decent hearing aid. And that can go up to, in our model, five thousand dollars for the top level pair. But in a clinic that can go up to ten to twelve thousand dollars. So there’s so much price disparity across the board. Take my grandfather, for example, on my other side, who, even though I run a hearing business, still has a stigma against wearing his hearing aid and will still say, I don’t need it, I don’t want it. And so it’s a lot of counseling that goes into saying, well, where are you struggling? And it really does take a family, a village to say, hey, you can’t see it. It’s happening gradually, but we’re all noticing it. We’re noticing that you’re sitting at the dinner table saying what multiple times that you have your hearing aid in, but they’re not turned on. It’s really simple factors like that. In terms of the pricing, what we try and do is make it as transparent as possible. But again, we’ll work with finance vendors. I think that a big trend that you’ll see in 2023 is financing of larger devices, especially in health. So we work with really good vendors on finance solutions. We also look at how can we offer a service and a plan that is ongoing? So can we break up some of the costs that’s connected with the device itself to the care that you’ll receive? And then I think once you’ve got over the initial stigma barrier, then you’ve got over the access barrier to going into the home. Then you’ve got over the financial barrier with the cost and the choices. It’s really the final barrier is, are you ready emotionally to actually want to do something about your hearing? And that seems so logical that people would want to, but they don’t. And so I think that’s where you really need buy in from the end person. Absolutely. And I’m excited to see hopefully some of the stigma around hearing aids become more and more eroded as we shift towards this over-the-counter environment. You started elaborating a bit on upcoming trends you see in 2023, but would be great to hear additional thoughts of yours with respect to broader trends impacting both the hearing health space or the at-home health space. Where do you think each of these industries is moving in the year ahead? Everything in a prediction in the sense is obviously just a prediction. My view from where I sit is I think that OTC is going to have a real impact on how many people enter the market. So I think in the clinic space, I think that you’re going to see a pretty consistent trend on where the volume has been in previous years. I think the OTC market is going to increase massively. So the online presence of hearing aids, the idea of buying a hearing aid on Amazon or a Best Buy or a Target or Walmart, all of these different vendors are going to come in. And so I think that that’s going to create this new incoming market much earlier with much more information than you’ve seen in previous years. I think that’s the trend in OTC that I would expect. And as interest increases, again, what my view is, is that not everyone is a candidate for OTC. And so it’s naturally going to springboard the rest of the market. Home care, I think, has been discussed so many times over, but I think is going to be the biggest trend continuing when you just look at the economies of cities and labor and how expensive it is to rent and have centralized locations versus where people actually spend their time. The idea of a mobile provider, a mobile clinician just makes so much sense. It makes so much sense to be in someone’s home, in their natural environment, and it’s more cost efficient for both the provider and the clinician. It’s more flexible work for the clinician themselves. So I think that that’s definitely going to be a trend that continues to increase. And then I think overall in the coming years, you’re going to see more consolidation of health care providers because I think that you don’t need 20 different providers each going to the home. I think what you’re going to see is groups come together to say, how can we provide a complete solution as a team? And I think that that will be one of the big trends that you’ll see. Now, I’d like to pivot a bit towards discussing your entrepreneurial journey. First of all, congratulations on the 10 million Series A capital fundraise earlier this year. What do you think were some of the key factors that led to success with your investors during the fundraising process? I think that we had a good business, which always helps. That was a good financial model. I think that we had really great early investors. So I met my first investors. I was pitching at an AARP conference for my kitchen at London. I was I was really just interested in the overall market. We met Abby Levy from Primetime Partners, and she really took a keen interest in what we were doing. She basically said, go and do this in the next year and we’ll be very interested. We came back three months later and said, OK, we’ve done it now. And so I think that put us in a good position to say, all right, we have a good foundation, good business model, good structure, good first investor. And then I think most people can understand the storyline. I think it just does make sense. I think there was a general surprise that this hasn’t been done. Definitely we went out to raise a Series A in Q2 2022, so probably the hardest time for fundraising when every deal is being changed. And I think what we’ve struck with people was actually there’s a real business model beneath this. There’s a tech component. There’s a component on aging. The prevailing trends of population studies match to what we’re saying. There’s a 10,000 people turning 65 every day. And as a model, it is very unique. So definitely not without its challenges. But I think we were really fortunate in in what we have built previously. And I think we were really fortunate in the group we found to actually work with us in Blue Heron, who have a really unique operating advisor model where they’re actually not involved themselves. What they’ll do is put someone on the board and have a group of advisors work with us to say, OK, how can we grow this? How can we make this actually impactful? So, yeah, definitely a challenge. But actually, I think we were pretty fortunate in that period that we managed to come through and be successful at the end. That’s incredible. As an entrepreneur, what most surprised you when starting the business? There were lots of surprises. I think the thing is, you never know until you do it. I think that you can study business. You can think about it. And there’s a lot of a lot of the time you’re making a bet on a logical assumption that just makes sense. And you’d be amazed how many times your logical approach just doesn’t work out the way you think it will. And I think that that was one of the big surprises. And I think that when we very first started, I fell into the trap of what most people do, which is a failure to really launch. You always seek perfection. And I think gradually you erode that away and you say, you know what, doing something is always better than doing nothing. Let’s get this to a really good place, build the foundation, move on, build the foundation, move on and then go and fix. And I think that that’s it’s often counterintuitive, the habits that matter most, especially in the early days. And then it just continues from there. That iterative cycle is one that I’ve continued to learn about in the entrepreneurship space. How do you go about capturing your patient and audiologist feedback and then implementing it towards the development of a better solution over time? It’s so much survey. So everything we do is informed by the customer. If someone cancels their order or returns, then either myself, my co-founder, one of our senior VPs will be on the phone with them. We always want to know. It’s a lot of surveys that go out via email. It’s a lot of information that the audiologist gathers when they’re in the home. Basically, any way and any where we can get the information from them, build a rapport so we actually get the real information, which I think is critical. I think it’s really easy for someone to fill out a survey with numbers and just circle it and send it back. It’s much harder to find what they truly felt. And I think that that’s why having an honest, open conversation, breaking the barrier to say, hey, look, we’re growing small business and we really want to get better at this, help us do that. I think that’s the most important thing. So it’s just constant feedback cycles. It sounds like there’s a lot going on on the back end. How big is your team currently? And do you have plans to expand in the coming year or two? We’re at 32 people at the moment. And then we’ve obviously got a lot of contractors, a lot of part time. I think that we definitely want to expand, but expand conservatively at the same time. We’re fully remote. And so there’s definitely challenges to remote work. But we have a really, really strong team. And I think that my goal has always been from the beginning and will continue to be, how can you do a lot with the right people rather than having a lot of people doing smaller tasks that maybe don’t actually matter to the end goal? So I don’t have a target in mind of let’s get to 100 people. It’s not really about the number of people. It’s just how many people do we need to feasibly get to where we want to be? When you say where we want to be, automatically, I can’t help but wonder, what are your biggest goals and aspirations for the business? And if you had to pick, I guess, just one area that you’re really excited to see from a growth standpoint, what would that be? I think we want to be the ultimate hearing provider. I think that if we can combine truly the two best bits of the whole market, the access to the easy products, the clinical care, and I think we do become the default best provider of hearing care. And I think that’s the ultimate goal. There’s that goal. And then it’s also, if I look really long term, can we do more in the home? Is there a way we can provide other services connected with our hearing that are going to actually help the same group of patients and customers that we currently work with? Can we be this holistic in-home vendor across sectors? I think that’s what excites me is if we can prove it in hearing, we can do so much more. But proving it in hearing itself is a massive undertaking and would be an incredible achievement if we can get there. I agree. I’m sure you’ve inspired many of our listeners with your entrepreneurial journey. Do you have any advice from your learnings as an entrepreneur or as an innovator in the healthcare industry? So much, but it’s a short podcast. There’s so many things I could say. I’m constantly learning. I think that there’s definitely a feeling, especially when you go from, you know, my role in the early days was I was doing everything. And so I was doing the sales and the customer service, and I would also be going on home visits and obviously not providing the actual care, but you really have an active role in everything. And stepping back and hiring people that are really, really strong, letting them actually guide you is critical. And I think that the constant, like, strive to learn, know that you’re not the smartest person in the room, know that your voice does carry the most weight in often conversations, but actually listen to what other people are saying, be prepared to fail. And ultimately, I think something I’ve really learned over the last year is have a really good support network because it is difficult. There’s definitely difficult moments, and it’s much, much easier when you can come to someone or a group of people with a problem and say, hey, this is what I’m doing. Help me with it instead of just punching your pillows in your bedroom. I think that’s the easier way. Well, Sam, thank you so much for joining me on the Pulse podcast today. I really enjoyed listening to your story, and I’m excited to see the company succeed in the years ahead. Thank you so much for the time. Thank you so much as well. Really enjoyed it.
