Joel Theisen

Scott 00:23

Hey everyone. This is Scott Tittle with VIUM Capital. I'd like to welcome you to this episode of our VIUM VERSED podcast. I'm really excited to talk to our guest today, Joel Thiessen, who is the founder and CEO of Lifespark, located in Saint Louis Park, Minnesota. Joel, welcome to our podcast.

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Joel 00:36

Hey, thanks for having me, Scott. Looking forward to it.

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Scott 00:37

Yeah. Hey, you know, you and I can talk about all kinds of things today, and we could talk for hours. But I want to get into some really exciting announcements you had recently as a company. And I know you're excited to talk about it, too, but, before we get started there, the name of your company is so intriguing to me, and it sounds very intentional. Tell our listeners a little bit about it. You founded the company about 20 years ago. Who do you serve? How do you serve them? And then maybe back into the name Lifespark because I have a feeling that probably runs through not only you as a leader, but all of your teammates and all the people you serve. So say a little bit about all those all those points.

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Joel 01:10

I'm a nurse by background. I've been working with seniors for 30 years. I did a public company with my in-laws. I did a for-profit venture startup in the 90s right, with a lot of capital. And then this company was kind of my holy grail. So when we started Scott 20 years ago in Minnesota here, the original name actually was Age Well, right. So we had the Age Well, and it was great. We built some great brand around it and we liked it. And then we're like, you know what? This isn't enough. It's not enough, man. We we had to do more than just Age Well, we want to spark lives. And so what really drove that was the client experience. Right? When you see seniors that have this really awesome kind of like life cycle and you're attracted to them, you see that glitter in their eye regardless of age. And so the intentionality was, hey, that's what we want to do. Our why is to help people really spark like to bring that not only for those that we serve, but for the employees, too, right? Because you know what a big deal that is. We all want to have matter and meaning in our work. And so it was intentional. So thanks for asking.

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And we've really loved bleeding purple. We use a lot of brands around it. We have a purple bus and we spark and everything we try to have fun with in our language around our culture is based on that. So thanks for asking and that's why.

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Scott 02:21

At your core you're a home care company, but I know you've got a lot of different services under your umbrella. We met many years ago because you partnered up with one of my favorite people in the world one of my mentors, Howie Groff from Tealwood. And you've got the Tealwood flag underneath your portfolio, too. But tell our listeners a little bit about how you serve all the people you serve and through what business lines.

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Joel 02:38

Yeah. Historically, right, I mean before there was any value basically I was part of it. We were doing things that we needed to do to be a valuable partner in senior services, right, in the home of community based. So we did the home services, home health, private duty, geriatric care coordination, etc. for a bunch of years. And I never quite frankly, I never really like being the home care, being put in a home care box, Scott, because I always thought more about the holistic, longitudinal perspective of these seniors because we get so isolated and hyper segmented in our own business units and business lines. And so I was always this guy that was like kind of bucking the current to say, look, I don't want to just build one thing, I want to really create the experience around the customer, not around my business case or my environment or my building or my thesis, right.

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So that over time, as we saw what happened with the Affordable Care Act and Obamacare and then ultimately what spun out of CMS and CMMI was alternative payment opportunities, I got super excited. And that's when we doubled down and tripled down on bringing in our own medical plan and bringing in hospice and palliation and then putting it all together in and around the client. So that's really the thesis of Lifespark. It started out obviously with humble beginnings and getting things that were revenue-based and that were giving us an opportunity to understand seniors' perspective and lifestyle from home and community always. And then we transitioned that into how do we bring it all together and what we call Lifespark Complete. And that's really what Lifespark’s all about now is to be that end-to-end delivery system. So that's really the story, and we've now been really fortunate and successful. And we have through that Lifespark Complete, through our whole cadre of different service arms and parts, we have about 30,000 seniors that we service every day.

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Scott 04:17

And are those all in the Minnesota market or in the surrounding states as well?

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Joel 04:21

Yeah, that's a great question. We're primarily in Minnesota. Although back to you, you mentioned Howie Groff. He's awesome, too. When we did that acquisition a number of years ago, they had some properties in Wisconsin that we took over as well. So we have some senior housing. Another piece of our business is senior housing. That's very important to us because we want to service people end to end in senior housing. And so, we have seven properties in Wisconsin out of our 51 and about 44 in the state of Minnesota, Scott.

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Scott 04:49

Well, I want to get into an exciting announcement you just had more recently. But before I get there I've had a chance to meet some of your senior team over the years, and they're all just so excited to work for you and work for your company and to serve seniors. And I think it's because you're such an incredible leader, Joel and I know you've got some great phrases where you think about your growth mindset and your business mindset: “failing forward” and “slowing down and getting clear”. Tell our listeners about what those phrases mean to you, how you use those as a leader as you think about how you built out your company. And so say a little bit about: I know “failing forward” is that not a reference to the great John Maxwell book, but say a little bit about those two phrases “failing forward” and “slowing down and getting clear”.

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Joel 05:27

Yeah, I'll take them piece by piece and then put them together. So you're right. I mean, none of these are new phrases, right? But you kind of, when you're young and you're learning from a lot of other people, you want to kind of live by certain things, right. And, really when I think about “failing forward”, when you think about the kind of company that I want to create that a lot of us like to create is really transformation, not iterative. Right? It's full transformation. I didn't want to just do a little bit better. I didn't want to do a kaizen. I want to really crush it. And so when you think about having to do that work, like anything that's great, right? You go through a lot of like fast fails, right? And you've got to be okay with failing because if you're not, you'll never take the risks big enough to transform. You'll just be iterative. And I didn't want to be iterative. So that whole failing forward is like, listen man, our culture is like, you’ve got to put yourself out there and you might get banged up, you might get bruised up, but just get back up.  And so “failing forward” is that age-old statement. I know people have used it for lots of times, but for us culturally, we talk a lot about it because we have to be okay and not bulldog people for failing. Right? We don't want to fail kind of ten again, you know? But we want to fail forward. And that learning is what really creates the opportunity to truly make a huge impact. And that's what Lifespark’s all about is huge impact. And so you just got to have that mindset, right. Any great entrepreneur will tell you that any great entrepreneur book will give you that kind of like that phrasing. And, I guess I'm more of a student than anything in that regard.

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As it relates to the other phrase, “slowing down to get clear”, as you could probably tell already, I'm definitely a guy that likes to move fast, I talk fast, I think fast, and I've kind of had to be this guy that had to learn how to put a turtle shell on. Right? Because I'm the hare and I like to run fast. I needed to put that turtle shell on me, because obviously, you can get your bell rung really fast in some of the risk taking, and if you don't slow down, just like I can do for a second right now I'll slow down and get clear. You know, you miss the old adage again, I'm gonna reason with metaphors now, but using that, you know, you miss the forest for the trees, right? So you start to miss what's really most important. And I think a lot of people and a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of companies get really focused on their business case or their environment or economic model, and they forget what the heck they're all about, right? They forget their why and they forget to slow down and say, wait, wait, wait, what are we really doing here? And so for me, from a culture standpoint and from a personal standpoint, the best thing I can do, and doctor Bill Thomas actually gave me that one a long time ago, was to really kind of breathe. Breathe, slow down, make damn sure you're clear about why you're doing what you're doing. And that's what it means to us. And we use it in our culture. We use it in how we operate. And that shows up in a lot of different ways operationally.

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Scott 08:00

I love your encouragement to your teammates to not be afraid to fail. Right. And I love that phrase ”we either winning or we're learning”, right? I think that's a really positive perspective. And that's what we're going to be moving forward. And you’ve got important things you're doing: you're taking care of seniors, taking care of employees. And so I think that's, I love your business model, strategy and that mindset, Joel. That's awesome.

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Well, let's just jump right into this exciting announcement you had more recently about launching this emergency response services program and say you obviously at some point saw that there was a real need to serve. And what was the problem you were trying to serve there? And maybe tell us a little bit about the service, the emergency response services program itself and how it works.

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Joel 08:33

So just a quick bit of context, right. So historically what Lifespark built in this end to end. What we wanted to be was proactive, predictive, prescriptive, right. That's the whole value based thesis. Right. Is you want to be out front. You want to avoid catastrophic failure or a roller coaster kind of running and so we built a lot of things around a single point of contact, geriatric medicine and geriatric expertise, and using data and insights to help us make better actions and trajectory change around those clients. So that was great, and we had that. But what the data showed us, Scott, and why we built, we call it urgent response, or you can call it an urgent response. But what we did and as we said, as we were looking at our thesis and we have full risk, right. So we have full global risk in these populations. So we have to be accountable for their hospital stays, their sniffs stays their home stays. Everything is under our umbrella. So as we looked at the data we saw that every time, and this is not rocket science to everybody out there, the most dangerous place to be in the most expensive place to be is where? In the hospital. So you don't want people and that's because they don't want to be there either, right? Nobody wants to be in acute care. So we said, look, we've got this great thesis on proactive predictive, prescriptive, but we still fail, right? Because these are complex seniors. So they still get into the hospital and the EMS system. And we looked at really good companies out there like Medically Home and Dispatch, and there's other companies that do hospital at home and acute care at home. And we partnered with them a little bit too. But the problem that we said is, look, we got to create an end to end. We’ve got to solve for that problem where we can't let go of their hand. We don't want to let them once we get them into, once they get into that spin cycle, we didn't want to let go of their hand and let the system chew them up and have 50 new services and spend and mess it all up, and that's what the data was showing. So we said, look, we’ve got to solve that. We've got physicians, we've got NPs, we've got triaging, we’ve got nurses, we've got a community. Let's build this. And so that's really was the impetus, Scott, to say, look, we have a first line of defense in our proactive predictive prescriptive. And now Lifespark has a second line of defense saying, listen, if we fail to meet the goalie, if we miss the shot, we're right there. We level on triage, we get in, we'll go to their home, we'll hit them with telehealth or even in the worst cases, if they do end up in an ambulance, right, they end up in the E.R., our people are actually going to the E.R. and leveling them out of the E.R., because no hospital either wants them in an observation stay or short stay that's not proper. And so, because we have all the history of these people, we know who they are. We know their medical record. We have all their history. We can be so much more beneficial for that client, that family, keeps them even from going into a hospital or getting out of the hospital very quickly in getting them back to their senior housing or to their house.

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So long to answer there. But that's why we did what we did and super excited about it.

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Scott 11:21

So essentially, you become the E.R. at home to X-Rays, EKGs, suturing surgery. I mean, what can't you do in someone's home or community?

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Joel 11:28

That's a great question. Again, this is a relatively new service for us, Scott. So I'll be a little careful here.

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We've been given fluids. We've been doing triple lines. We've been working on we've been doing a lot in the home already. Right. So I guess what you can't do obviously is when somebody has a Marty, you know, myocardial infarction, right. You're not going to mess with that. So that's in our leveling and our triage. We want them obviously a hospital is a great place for emergent serious intervention. And then obviously the other thing that we don't do is we don't do surgeries. Other than that though, there's the technology as you're well aware of  and everybody out there on this call, there's a lot we can do as long as it's coordinated, orchestrated through a truly bona fide medical delivery system. Right. And so it's pretty cool. And having the preventive side and the reactive acute side, usually people build one or the other, right? They have this thesis, but tying it with the client again I always want to put that client in the middle, Scott, because when you know that person, you have that trust. You can architect obviously navigate those those right solutions so much more effectively.

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Scott 12:34

Yeah. And I imagine there's some real strong emotional, positive energy components to this, right? Where the senior and the families know that you already know them. You already got the records, right. You're kind of removing that unnecessary transport to a hospital, kind of reducing stress. And they know you, you know them, but maybe say a little bit about the data points, too What exactly will you be measuring going forward? And to determine how do you define success here?

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Joel 12:57

Great question. You know, the obvious ones, right, are ED and inpatient avoidance. Right? That's obvious. Those are normal. And those are highly tracked through every system. And then some of the other ones that we're looking at, because we're again, we're at full risk, we have all that claims data, so MLR reduction is part of that. That's why people want that is medical loss ratio or medical spend, right? To make it for those of you that don't know is acronyms sorry, I’m throwing acronyms out there. But really what the other cool parts are, Scott, that we track is we track the Net Promoter score and the client experience as well. Because what we've already found, which I didn't expect this much of an uptick, is that the families and the clients, now that we're starting to roll this out aggressively, they're like, oh my gosh. Like I don't have to take mom to the urgent care. And she waited six hours last time. It's like the families and the clients like I didn't think it was going to be a marketing thing, right? Or a benefit to the ecosystem of being in our global kind of our complete senior health model. But the families and the clients just are sick and tired of getting beaten and thrashed in the poor options that they have around urgent and emergent services.

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Scott 14:12

And if I heard you correctly, in the event that someone does need to go to the hospital, you've got a teammate with them also, right? So imagine that transition of care is so much more fluid. You've got somebody speaking the language with the E.R. staff right there. And it's not a new conversation. So I imagine that's got to be an incredible experience, too. But family members that had to do that on their own, right?

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Joel 14:29

See, you're helping me out, Scott. That's like you're connecting all the dots, right? See, that's what people don't do and what people call health care. I don't even call it health care. I call health because I want to get paid to keep people healthy. Right. And I keep them out of harm's way. That's how all of our jobs are. I'm a clinician myself. Right. And we forget that doing more stuff isn't better. Right. And so I think that tying those two things together, I believe I'm not 100% sure, but I know there's a lot of companies that are from a home community standpoint, trying to tie this together. I think we're the only one that have tied it together ourselves, right? People are using other services and multiple different partners, which is great, right? I love it, but your point that I'm making and what I wanted to double back on is the difference is the data and the information. And then what we call electronic life record, not another medic. We have five medical records, right? We have five EMR and satellites, but because of our different service lines, right? But by tying all the information we know, Betty. We know Bob. We know what the hell's going on. We truly have their pulse. We know what they want. We know what their family wants. It's all been negotiated. So that experience for them of fear, uncertainty, anxiety, right? Much of that goes away, right? Even if we meet them in the E.R. because we have prompt system in Minnesota. So we get immediate response for when somebody hits the E.R. if it’s one of our members. Even if the client doesn't call us first, which we want them to call us first, but even if they don't, we can mobilize, right? Because we have that dispatch system.

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You're exactly right. That synergy again, it's not rocket science. I'm not the smartest guy in the room, but I'm really driven and tie in the whole thesis together. But most providers don't do it. It's very hyper segmented.

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Scott 16:15

Well Joel, I’m going to give you credit; you are with the smartest guys in the room and there's only two of us here for anyone listening. But the reason why I wanted to tee up your your business mindset early on about “failing forward” and “slowing down, getting clear” is because I want for our listeners understand: in order to put something like this together, I have to believe you had a slow moment and a moment of clarity where you thought: we’ve got to do this. Our clients need it. Our families need it. Our staff desires it. We can do this. And thanks for taking this leap and doing it.

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I know that this is still relatively new, but kind of what's next for the program? Are you looking at other populations you may serve? other other communities? Other partnerships? Again, I think you just launched this the end of June, right, so formally. But, say what's already next on your whiteboard? What's coming next?

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Joel 16:58

Yeah. It's really that's a great question too. And because we've been running fast and putting a lot of things together under our complete you know obviously the urgent response is a part of that, Scott, that you're talking about. But it's really a lot of the other stuff too, right? It's having really an awesome experience with what we call life managers and nurse practitioners and physicians out in the home being proactive, being predictive, getting those insights, avoiding hospital stays, improving outcomes, helping them paliate when it's appropriate versus restorative care, getting the quality, right? Getting as everybody knows, the diagnostic accuracy. Those things that take a lot of effort and energy. This urgent response was to meet what I'm calling inside our team homes, talking about it internally is that it's kind of the last brick in the house, right? When you talk about the complexity of what we've built, it takes a lot of commitment, right? Because everybody wants a quick fix or quick solution or a very focused, very simple business case to take to the venture world and get money and then sell it to UHC or something. Everybody likes those quick and fast solutions. This one's been a long time to build and a lot of complexity. And trying to make it simple has been the key. So to answer your question, where I'm at where Lifespark’s at, we're really excited about full execution now and really working with our payer partners to deliver on the thesis because it's still not 100% always clear, right? Because there's a lot that goes into full stack MLR risks. So for us, I don't want to try to build, we've got a lot of architecture in a lot of pieces, as you know, already. So mine is more about continue to integrate and continue to build the culture around execution and really, really knock that out of the park. So then we can truly bonafide kind of be a thought leader in the space and help others and just really help this proliferate for more seniors all over the country. And that's really the goal. We're going to obviously have opportunities to scale. We have ideas on that. But because we have Blue Cross Blue Shield in Minnesota and Ucare in our cap table that are pushing lives our way and we want to push more. I don't have a marketing or bus-dev problem. I have an execution issue, not problem, but opportunity, right, to scale. So that's kind of where we're at. So I've done enough of the kind of the look at the pretty birds and like I've seen them all and I've grabbed as many as I can. But now it's like, let's just really take care of them and put them into a really tight, thoughtful delivery system that really cracks the code on senior health around the country.

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Scott 19:30

Yeah, maybe just a pinpoint question on you mentioned infrastructure architecture. So say a little bit about workforce because I know that's been a real challenge for really everyone around the country, in the sector, regardless of the component that you serve in senior housing and long term care. But have you had challenges kind of bringing people in your fold? What kind of staffing model do you need to put in behind your urgent response services? Say a little about your staffing challenges and how you’ve met them.

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Joel 19:53

Yeah, I love that question because that's what everybody talks about it is, especially post-Covid and everything it's been brutal. There's two answers to and I'll be completely transparent. What's awesome about Lifespark is that we've always been about culture first, right? And some of the things of why I think I'm on here, right, is because I'm pretty passionate and I really care about the delivery system and I care about what we ultimately do. So I think part of our challenge, right, is mitigated by the fact that people want to come to, Lifespark, right? People want to be there. And why? Because they get three things: They learn a lot, right? Because it's transformative. They can make a lot of money because we give a lot of equity to our people, because we want them to be part of that real world spirit, and we give them incentives in different ways. So incentives are important. So, you know, that's great. So you learn a lot, you make a lot and you have fun, right? Those are the three things in any perfect job. If you can get those three things you stay right. You have fun and you learn a lot and you make a lot. Oh that's great. Usually you get 2 or 3 of those two of 3 or 1 of three in most jobs. So at Lifespark we always focus on making sure we can balance those three, Scott. And by balancing those three we have a really good inflow. We've had 18 times we've been the top work place in Minnesota. We win lots of awards and things that are third party validated. We do a lot of internal Net Promoter scores on our employees. We're even kicking off now an employee life planning process, so all of our employees, not only are they getting their KPIs and their individual plans, but they're actually, we're working on them. How do they think about their life and what matters to them beyond Lifespark? And we're working to make sure we document and we support them as leaders. So a lot of things, Scott, it's not a silver bullet, but how I see workforce is it's going to be even more of a challenge as we all know going forward it's going to get worse, it's not going to get better. And so he or she or those that really have a culture that is like a magnet are going to win big. And so we are always working on the magnetization of our brand. And with that said, some of our different parts of our business, when we think about home care, think about housing, do we have turnover? Sure we do. Right? My gosh, we have turnover. But it's we're the cream of the craft, right? Turnover is turnover, but we are like 50% of what the market is. So I would just say what really matters and if I could profess anything to people out there is you've got to really get those three ingredients, right? You’ve got to invest in culture constantly. And you've got to create a business case that's, especially in this new world that has to have humanity to it. What's the good that you're doing in the world. And if people don't see that, they are just fleeing at every opportunity.

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Scott 22:28

Well, I think for our listeners, they can all tell why I wanted to have you on today, Joel. Just wanted to hear your story, hear your passion for serving seniors in this really new and innovative way you're doing it, the urgent response services. So what I'd love to do is have you on maybe about a year from now, just going to hear things are going to get an update if that's all right. I would love to hear about your progress and your journey. It would be really exciting.

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Joel 22:45

Yeah. Thanks, Scott. This is a lot of fun, and I'm a huge positive energy force for those that are doing home community. I don't care, I'm not about competition. Yes, we have competition, but I want everybody to win. I want home community to win. Scott, I know a lot of people on this call are from the home community and housing. Man, I want everybody out there just to get after it, right? Because that's where population health and value based work should happen in my opinion. It shouldn't come from acute care down. I’m not anti acute care, but you know my point is the people on this call are the people that need to drive the change, and so really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you and hopefully some of those listeners out there and would love to come back in a year and share.

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Scott 23:22

Hey, before we close, I’ve got two fun questions for you, just personal. One, I always ask our guests, but one in particular I read, and this will not surprise our listeners now knowing you for about 20 minutes, you're super got a lot of energy, and I think you love just being outside and competing. Did I read that you do Ironman races and you actually then maybe have a goal for it, not only just completing them and surviving them, but maybe even placing pretty high in your age group? Say a little about that and maybe about a more recent race you had.

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Joel 23:47

Yeah. You know, I mean, that's true, right? I'm just kind of a, you know, that's my stress reliever, right? Because we all work super hard. So I do a lot of stuff, Scott. Yes. Iron Man's I do. I did the Boston Marathon. I placed real well there. I've done Ironman and things like that. And I do really like to be competitive at a high level and push myself. It's not so much about competition, but I really like to get everything I can and put myself to the limit. It's kind of like when you know you have the possibility that you need to take the responsibility to perform, right? And so that's just a personal conviction of mine. I race cars also, and I do a bunch of other crazy stuff. But I do really like the heaviness and the grind of endurance sports. And the reason I do is kind of like, in business, I want to be back to that turtle. It's not a sprint, it's a marathon to do this kind of work. And it helps me really both walk my own talk from a physical standpoint which obviously affects your mental standpoint. And they're so tied together for me. So if I'm not doing that, I don't I'm not feeling the right kind of personal dopamine in my brain. And I'm not feeling the energy that I need to do other transformative work. So thanks for asking that. Yeah, I have a lot of fun with people around those types of things. And again, it really is about walking your talk.

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Scott 25:09

One more question I always ask our listeners kind of what's on your nightstand? Is there a book you're reading right now or a book you'd like to recommend people? A book you give to your staff, your teammates? What's a leave behind for our listeners they may want to pick up?

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Joel 25:19

Again I've been around for a while,  so some of my favorite books are some of the older books, right? I love Good to Great. I love Built to Last. I love those books from a business standpoint. I also like a lot of adventure books, as you can imagine, right? I like Krakauer, I like Into Thin Air and Into the Wild, those kind of books. Those are some of my favorite books. And then my final one is kind of maybe a controversial one for some people out there, but I'll just say it anyway because I don't really care, right? I'll tell you how it is. I really like the book called Atlas Shrugged. It's an older book that was written a long time ago. I like it because it presses accountability and it presses performance, right? And so I want everybody in my community to want to be together and win together. And that's kind of just a M.O. kind of how I operate. So those are some meaningful books to me and some things that are on my nightstand and things that I refer back to occasionally and, so thank you for asking.

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Scott 26:14

Once in awhile you'll see the line “Who is John Galt?”, right?

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Joel 26:17

So yeah. You know, so you read it.

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Scott 26:19

That's a great one. Yeah.

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Joel 26:20

Yeah it is.

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Scott 26:21

Well, Joel, hey, thanks for being on today. I really enjoyed this conversation. I know we're gonna see each other through conferences throughout the next part of the second half this year at some point. I’d love to be up Minnesota and see you in person at some point, but I love you to be back in the podcast because I know for our listeners, they're really excited about what you're doing there and how you're serving seniors and passionate way and families, residents and love to hear how things are going. So, maybe we kind of put some on the calendar about a year from now and have you back on as a guest.

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Joel 26:42

Thanks again, Scott. You’re really great to talk to, and thanks for the great questions. And I really appreciate it.

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Scott 26:47

Yeah. Thanks, Joel. And for our listeners, thanks for tuning in. This is VERSED.