Statlinx Aligns to Grow 219% with Crews & co.
CLIENT
Statlinx is a healthcare communications company providing patient access center solutions that keep physicians connected to the people who depend on them.
CHALLENGES
Statlinx sought alignment among its leadership team that would power growth, a financial strategy that would increase revenue and enterprise value, and a sales strategy that would allow for expansion into a broader market.
SOLUTION
Statlinx partnered with Crews & co., leveraging the consultancy’s Growth Method and extensive Finance Services.
RESULTS
- Statlinx aligns its leadership team under unified objectives and strategically places the right people in the right seats.
- Statlinx activates fiscal awareness strategies to achieve 219% revenue growth, a 30 percentage point increase in net margin, and estimated enterprise value improvement of 325%.
- Statlinx establishes a high-impact hiring pipeline that allows the company to pursue growth-focused sales initiatives.
Statlinx: Built on Trust
Founded in 2012 as a traditional, after-hours answering service for doctors and hospitals, Statlinx quickly demonstrated the rare ability to build deep relationships with its healthcare clientele. “It’s our superpower,” says Steve Showalter, the Connecticut-based company’s Founder and President.
The very real relationships established at the telemessaging level made Statlinx the natural “go-to” resource whenever a client encountered adjacent administrative issues. Initially, Statlinx sought to help by offering call center training, but its clients wanted something different. They wanted a full-service solution.
Evolving to serve
Soon, Statlinx was managing care-critical, complex administrative workflows for busy hospitals and burgeoning medical practices. Statlinx has since evolved into a comprehensive healthcare communications company with US-based, HIPAA-certified Patient Care Representatives empowered to schedule appointments, obtain prior authorizations, relay patient documentation, perform COVID-19 screenings, and even help physicians track down lab results.
By coordinating key healthcare communications, Statlinx enables hospitals and doctors to focus on what they do best: care for their patients. The company supports over 300 healthcare clients representing approximately 3,000 physicians. And the growth is just getting started.
“Statlinx is all about relationships, and I was determined to figure out how to make a relationships-based business truly successful.”
Statlinx’s Journey to Growth
Statlinx evolved rapidly in its first few years, but Steve had an even bigger vision for the company. He needed support to overcome barriers to meaningful growth.
Challenge: Find supportive coaches with proven strategies
Steve knew he needed help achieving growth for Statlinx, and business coaching seemed like the ideal solution. By the end of 2017, however, he had tried several coaching systems with unsatisfactory results.
“The first coaches I worked with missed the mark,” he acknowledges. “They all tried to start with our frontline operators and work upward, but I felt strongly that we needed to create alignment among our senior leadership team first.”
Solution: Statlinx partners with Crews & co. for high-impact business coaching
Only Boston-based Crews & co. offered the top-down business development approach Statlinx needed.
Steve had known Eric Crews for many years, and he respected and trusted the Crews & co. Founder and CEO. Passionate about helping companies achieve their growth goals, Eric had a reputation for helping organizations increase profitability, optimize operations, and strengthen their leadership teams.
In 2018, Steve formalized his relationship with Crews & co., and he and Eric got to work, identifying Statlinx’s challenges and implementing solutions.
Challenge: Misalignment among the senior leadership team
The company’s frontline employees were doing great work and consistently impressing the clients, but in the C-suite, there was a lack of consensus on how to move Statlinx forward—or even where they were trying to go. That missing alignment was directly blocking the company’s growth.
“We really needed our senior leadership team in alignment with a shared vision of what Statlinx could be,” Steve says.
Solution: Crews & co. institutes protocols for alignment
Eric introduced Steve to a set of tools that, for the first time, provided the Statlinx founder with a way to create, share, and execute against a big-picture vision for the company. At the leadership level, the team gained clarity and alignment on key aspects of the business:
- The values, mission, and niche of the organization
- The key roles the business needed and whether the team had the people to fill them
- Short-term and long-term financial targets
“As a direct result of working with Crews & co., Statlinx has everybody in alignment and on the same path,” Steve shares, “and we know how to get the right people in the right seats.” With aligned clarity of vision, Statlinx stakeholders feel a strong sense of ownership over the company’s goals and enjoy a clear picture of how their work contributes to its success.
“Statlinx now has everybody in alignment and on the same path, and we know how to get the right people in the right seats.”
Challenge: Reduce overwork and prevent burnout
Like many founders, Steve is a visionary—but, like many founders, he found himself taking on far too much responsibility outside his zone of genius. “I never wanted to be in charge of everything,” Steve admits, “but that’s exactly what I was doing.”
Steve’s team had come to expect nothing less of their leader, and the burden of those expectations was putting undue pressure on Steve and creating inefficiencies across the company.
Solution: The Growth Method clearly defines roles and responsibilities
“Through our work with Crews and co., I got permission not to be the head of compliance and the head of finance and the head of tech and all these other things,” Steve explains. “Most importantly, my team gave me that permission. We realized that if I kept trying to do everything, we would never build the business we wanted to build. I had to get out of the way and let my operational people actually do what we set out to do.”
“We realized that if I kept trying to do everything, we would never build the business we wanted to build.”
Steve reserves his highest praise for the impact on his relationship with Maggie Stevens, Steve’s right hand. He states, “Strengthening that relationship has played a critical role in our ability to grow.”
Emphasizing operational strength, Crews & co.’s approach:
- Freed Steve to be the visionary by highlighting specific tasks he should relinquish
- Emboldened the operational team by implementing accountability strategies
- Bolstered frontline results by affirming Maggie’s decision-making authority
- Established complete trust within the leadership team by prioritizing financial transparency
Challenge: Eliminate unhelpful scorecard metrics
“Our old scorecard never inspired me,” says Steve. “And it didn’t make me feel like I had my finger on the pulse of the business.”
At the start of Statlinx’s partnership with Crews & co., the company’s scorecard tracked only trailing metrics:
- Total revenue (calculated by the length of a phone call)
- Abandon rate (indicated by the percentage of users who ended the call before reaching an operator)
The problem, Steve recognized, was that “these numbers didn’t help with prediction.”
Solution: Statlinx adopts leading scorecard metrics that drive growth
Today, the Statlinx scorecard remains simple, but the metrics have been refined.
“A company’s key metrics are usually discovered, not designed,” Steve explains. “It can take some trial and error to find the right ones for your business.”
While calculating labor efficiency for each frontline employee, Steve says that “a lightbulb went off” when he identified a powerful leading metric: talk time percentage.
“Talk time percentage is the single most important number that drives our business,” he asserts.
By tracking the number of minutes per hour an operator is engaged on the phone, Steve can gauge labor efficiency, profitability, and capacity. Talk time percentage can be monitored in real-time, enabling managers to quickly address any issues that arise.
Along with talk time percentage, Statlinx still measures abandon rate to track quality, and the team has added a sales metric to promote growth. Nothing more.
“Our current scorecard tells me exactly how the company is performing—without any complex analysis,” Steve reports. “When the scorecard is green, we’ve hit our targets!”
Challenge: Direct and control the business with data
Statlinx’s previous finance team simply wasn’t the right fit for the rapidly evolving business. Steve struggled to obtain critical numbers in a timely manner and needed support understanding what the data meant for his company or how to leverage it for growth.
Solution: New Crews & co. finance partners bring insight and awareness
Steve realized that “if we were going to scale this business the way we wanted to, we had to become masters of our money.” So when Eric recommended Crews & co. Finance Consultant Charles Li, Statlinx didn’t hesitate to make the switch.
“Charles brought to light some hard truths,” Steve discloses. “I’d known fiscal awareness was important, but I knew it in a head-in-the-sand kind of way. Charles not only revealed our numbers accurately but also helped us to see the stories behind those numbers.”
As Statlinx adopted the pricing principles Charles brought to the table, its leadership team realized exactly how much authorship they held over the company’s financial story and where it would take them.
The Statlinx leadership team realized exactly how much authorship they held over the company’s financial story and where it would take them.
Eventually, Statlinx brought on Darren Fredette, a Crews & co. Strategic Partner and Senior Advisor, to help the company develop advanced fiscal planning strategies. Darren is working with the company to help achieve awareness of its enterprise value, its place in the market, and how to strengthen those foundations.
Steve expands, “In addition to his incredible knowledge of finance, Darren has a gift for inspiring people. He’ll tell the team, You guys have done a good job here, and the team gets really fired up. We all feel like Darren is one of us. His heart is in it.”
Challenge: Win new business and expand nationwide
With almost no customer attrition, Statlinx frequently employs a “land and expand’ strategy. As the company strengthens its relationship with a client, it’s able to gradually advance that client from introductory services to its more specialized solutions.
But this approach “doesn’t land any new legs under the table,” as Steve explains. Instead, his company’s growth has remained largely insular, as the same clients develop new needs and procure value-added services.
Significant growth requires more new clients. To get new clients, Statlinx needed a supercharged sales strategy with a team to match.
Solution: Statlinx leverages fractional CRO support to enable sales expansion
Steve knew that for Statlinx to expand, he would need access to additional capacity. His growing workforce had to deliver the same excellent service that had become the company’s trademark. But a high cost of living and stiff competition for entry-level positions made it difficult to establish a hiring pipeline in CT. Spurred by the pandemic, Steve took Statlinx remote; the company now has employees in close to 30 states.
As more frontline workers became available, Statlinx leadership identified the need for middle management. The next step was to develop an in-house training program that supported internal promotion, allowing employees to grow in their careers while remaining at the company.
With the core elements of Statlinx’s workforce firmly established, Steve knew he had an opportunity to pursue new clients and push beyond the “land and expand” approach. It was time to build out the company’s sales function.
To that end, Statlinx recently welcomed Crews & co.’s Brendan Leonard as fractional Chief Revenue Officer to build a sales team, win new business, and continue the company’s growth journey.
“For the first time, we have a regional director of sales in Scottsdale, Arizona, who will build relationships from Texas to Las Vegas!” Steve exclaims. “Our sales team strategy is still in its infancy, but exciting things are on the horizon.”
Measurable Results
- Following on the heels of two momentum-building years, Statlinx recorded 219% revenue growth from 2020 to 2022.
- In that same time period, Statlinx reported a 30 percentage point increase in net margin.
- The company’s growth has led to an estimated 325% increase in business valuation.
- Statlinx’s employee retention rate is 10x the industry average, and its client attrition rate is so low it’s effectively immeasurable.
The Bottom Line: “Your Business Is Our Business.”
When someone tells Steve they’re looking for a coach, he asks them, “What are you trying to accomplish?” followed by, “How vulnerable are you willing to be?”
Because, in his words, “The results are achievable—if you put your full faith in your coach. Thanks to Crews & co., we have people on our advisory team who we wouldn't have had otherwise—and I didn't have to go find them!”
At Crews & co., one of our core values says it best: Your business is our business.
“After five years together, I can confirm that the Crews & co. team is so completely accessible and available to us that they feel like our people,” Steve affirms. “If you're looking to significantly expand your advisory panel, I can't recommend a better partner than Crews & co.”
