Today’s guest has more than 30 years of experience in engineering, operations management, and manufacturing. He’s a six sigma black belt and an executive champion. Robert Rose is the CEO at MedWand. Robert joins host Valerie Cobb to share his tips on how companies can grow their revenue and work their way out of the maze.

Takeaways:

• Listen to the voice of your customer. You will have a good chance of succeeding if you know what your customers want.
• You want to be adaptable to what your customers’ needs are. That is more important than ever in an emerging market.
• You must introduce your engineering group to your call center group and make it a closed loop.
• Revenue goes both ways. It covers what is coming into your company and what is going out, which can show how well you run your company.
• As a chief revenue officer, you need to look at the direction the company is going and identify any needs that might come up.
• Don’t sell past the close.
• Surround yourself with a great team. If you have the right people, then you won’t need to micromanage them.

Quote of the Show:

2:18 “We could learn as leaders of companies to abandon our preconceptions of things, listen to the voice of your customer, and be ready to pivot.”

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-rose-549b926/
• Website: https://www.medwand.com/

Ways to Tune In:

• Amazon Music – https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7d80f727-4d62-4d16-a0c9-96ec7bda6c6b/the-revenue-maze
• Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/6azAXp0qFgrmjcql0jeJM8
• Google Podcast –  https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucmV2ZW51ZW1hemUuY29tL2ZlZWQueG1s

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Watch the episode here

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Creating A Closed Loop – Robert Rose – The Revenue Maze

I’m super excited to have you on the show. I have an amazing guest and I’ve been waiting for this one because I’m super excited about him. He has more than 30 years of executive experience in the engineering and operations management and manufacturing space. He’s an ASQ-trained Six Sigma Black Belt and executive champion. He was on the executive team that launched the RED Digital camera in the entertainment and film space, and that is a very big deal. He transitioned to something cool. He is the CEO at MedWand. We’ll get into that story too. I’m super excited about that. Welcome, Robert Rose.

Thank you, Valerie. It’s my pleasure to be here.

I love these stories. One of the most fun things about being a show host is I get to hear about all these great things. We’re going to learn even more about you, but we always start the show with one thing. What is one thing that you can tell the audience that will help them get out of the revenue maze?

The most important lesson that we can learn as leaders of companies is to abandon our preconceptions of things. Listen to the voice of your customer and be ready to pivot because what you think is going to happen isn’t. You need to be listening and paying attention. If you listen to what your customers want, you got a good chance of succeeding.

There have been a few that are like, “Why do we need to keep being reminded of this?” It must be incredibly difficult. I’m in revenue, so I know it’s very difficult. Sometimes we get very myopic. Give us a few pointers on how you’ve navigated that. How can you help us listen better?

I think if you’re going to be successful, there are only three real value propositions on earth. Customer intimacy, price, or operational excellence. You got to be perfect at one, really good at a second, and the third one, you don’t have to worry about too much. We can take any company that’s successful in revenue generation and attribute one of those as their leading mantra. Intel and Microsoft are good examples of technological leaders.

From a customer’s standpoint or when you’re talking about delighting a customer, Starbucks goes that way. Why else would we pay $5 for a cup of coffee? There’s a price and the price is okay. If you’re the lowest price, you may generate more revenue, but you got to make it up in volume. You need to know what you’re good at and stay that way. For me personally, my successes have been more focused on new and unique technology like RED Digital, where we invented the 4K camera. We obsoleted film.

It’s all that little stuff.

It was a great run. Back in the day, I was with Tandy/Radio Shack Systems Integration back when Michael Dell was starting to make build-to-order computers. We had a great infrastructure. We could do it faster and as well as he could do it, and we had a great market. You have to understand where the market need is and be able to fill that. If you’ve got a compelling product and a good market, go out and be the very best you can on one of those value propositions and you should be able to sell stuff.

You have to understand where the market need is and be able to fill that. If you have a compelling product and a good market, go out and be the best you can on one of those value propositions.

You talked about generating revenue. It’s not just about revenue. It’s about operational excellence. You can’t be large and onerous, and sloppy in everything that you do. You have a great product, but if you lose $2 on everyone that you ship, you can’t make it up in volume.

Then you are not so much a nonprofit.

Even a nonprofit has to guard their funding. Eventually, somebody is going to say, “I’m sorry. It’s enough.” You do have to be operationally excellent. That’s where the Six Sigma stuff comes in. It’s being able to focus on continuous improvement and the voice of the customer. The rest of it tends to work itself out.

You described to me a three-legged stool, and one of them has to be done well. I have noticed there are a few people recently. The life cycle of companies sometimes is that they’re not so well in one of those areas, and then they pick it up. It used to be that Microsoft was awful with tech support for small businesses. Now, they are rocking tech support. I can get them as fast on the line as HubSpot in seconds. They’ve done an amazing turn and then when you started mentioning some of those being the forerunner in some of those areas, listening to the voice of the customer helps you do that. That’s the whole point. If you’re in a pre-emerging market, it’s much easier than if you’re trying to compete head-on.

I have a great example of this having traveled extensively throughout my career. Back in the day when America West flew out of Phoenix, primarily in the Southwest, they had one of the best call center operations in the airline industry. If you called America West for a reservation or for a problem, they were on the phone just like that. Whoever answered spoke English. It was likely in Phoenix where their call centers were located as a part of their company.

If you tried to call some other airlines, you’re going to wait on hold for 1 hour to 1.5 hours. The level of service caused me to want to fly America West. An airplane is an airplane and they’re not that much different once you get on board, but it’s the whole process of getting there. Consumers speak with their wallets in that regard. It’s important to listen to the voice of the customer. Internally, you’ve got to look at why the phone rings. I took over a computer company that was losing a ton of money back in 2000.

I won’t name them, but I was brought in to do a turnaround. I spent the first few days before I ever went to their factory looking at the books. I was like, “Why do you have all these people in your call center?” Looking at the call center metrics, their speed to answer was being measured in hours instead of seconds. Their first-pass resolution was poor because they weren’t focused on why the phone rang and what it was the customers were calling about.

This goes back to the voice of the customer, but it’s not just about the product you’re providing but about the back-end services that you’re providing so that when your customer calls you, you can resolve the problem instantly. From a revenue standpoint, that sells more stuff. From an operational standpoint, it costs less money. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but you have to introduce this to the manufacturing space, to your engineering group, to your call center group, to your manufacturing group, to your quality group, and make it a closed loop.

Too often, companies leave that loop open somewhere. It’s always the customer that ends up suffering in the end because you can’t close a problem or answer a question that might be germane in somebody making a decision on a purchase, particularly a major purchase on an expensive product. There isn’t one thing, but there are certain basic disciplines that you’ve got to master if you’re going to have predictable revenue and successful operations.

The last piece of that or to carry it a little bit further as an executive or as a manager, you got to look at the P&L and managed by P&L. Look where the money is going. Look for those hidden profit leaks. Usually, when you kick a rock and find a profit leak underneath, you’re also going to find a customer service problem because you’re spending money on something you shouldn’t be. To my mind, revenue goes both ways. It’s what’s coming in, but it’s also what’s going out, and what you keep based on how well you run your company.

We’ll have a different dialogue, but there’s the whole thought process of what is the CRO versus a VP of Sales. We’ll do that offline. It is talking about some of that closing that loop. There is a misunderstanding in that realm as well, but I love what you’re saying. As I said, I was super excited to have you on my show simply because I love your journey and what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and how you’re moving forward. I know that some of this was brought from a little bit of life experience. Let’s go back a little bit. What brought you to this point? Maybe it’s too difficult to pinpoint, but a pivotal moment in your life that went, “This is my journey. This is where I’m going.”

Other than sheer dumb luck and getting sold, I sometimes feel like fish. I’ve been in enough companies that have been sold. That has been a story of my life as well. Let’s go back to about 1994. I was working for a company in South Florida that made onboard entertainment systems for commercial aircraft. Our company was sold to Northrop. I found myself in South Florida without a job and it wasn’t exactly the bastion of technology down there. It wasn’t like being in Silicon Valley.

I knew some key people in the Tandy organization. I got on the phone and started dialing for dollars saying, “I need a job here.” Long story short, I ended up taking a job with Tandy to take over a service center in a brand-new Computer City store in Georgia. I took a 50% pay cut to do this, but I had a secret mission from my boss in Fort Worth at Tandy.

He was like, “These service centers do okay in the computer city stores, but we’re looking for ways to enhance the revenue. How do you do that? We want you to go in and take a look. We know your history a little bit, and see if you can find new ways to cause these service centers to become more profit centers so the store is what it is, and it sells itself.”

This is a brand new store, 2 or 3 months. One of the salespeople in the corporate sales group came over and said, “The weather channel would like to have a whole bunch of these computers. They were down the street from us. However, what they want is different than anything we have here. Can you guys build those for them?” I said, “Yeah, sure we can.” We got all the parts we need and we built it.

That started us doing build-to-order computers in that little store in Georgia. Within six months, we had grown a business that was expected to do a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year in service work to a couple of million dollars a year pace in build-to-order because we started offering it through our corporate sales site. We expanded to some of the other stores.

One day, the VP of Tandy Retail Services walked into my little service center. He came all the way out from Fort Worth and said, “We need to go to lunch.” He is one of the great mentors in my career. His name is Bob McClure. Bob said, “This is great. I’ve got 1,500 Radio Shack franchise stores, the Incredible Universe chain, and all of the Computer City chains that need to have these services. I’ve got an empty building out in Texas. It’s yours. You’re now Group General Manager of Tandy Systems Integration. Pick the people you want to move to Fort Worth tomorrow.”

That’s a true story and I did. I took most of my team with me out of that little store, and we built a factory and we were doing $30 million in business six months down the road. It snowballed from there as far as my career is concerned because a year or so later, Tandy sold the Computer City stores to CompUSA. They looked at what we were doing and wanted our factory and our build-to-order capabilities as part of the deal.

What came out of that was CompUSA PC and all of us went to CompUSA. My core team and I stayed with CompUSA until it was sold to Carlos Slim. It’s Telmex in Mexico, and we saw the writing on the wall for that. From there, I ended up being the Global Vice President of Operations for Wiley Systems. I was there until Wiley was sold to Arrow. I went on to do that recovery mission on the next computer company.

It escalated my career as we went. Along the way, I became a student at Jack Welch and Six Sigma and started to see what it meant to be operationally excellent. I decided that a lot of people paid lip service to Six Sigma, but I couldn’t bring it into a company and do it right unless I understood it myself. I went through the ASQ training and became a black belt and executive champion, which is not quite even being a black belt but only endorsing it. It’s driving an entire Six Sigma initiative for more than one company from the top down. It worked. It’s been a little different lately.

It is certainly an amazing story when we talk about those things because when I go into companies, I was taught high involvement planning to create that excellence loop every single year for forecasting out. But I am not Six Sigma. I’ve read up on it and I’ve met people. I’m like, “They are just the sharpest people. I should probably do that.”

Yeah, but be careful because you can mess that up too. We’ve met people along the way at kaizen events. They’ll do kaizen events for the sake of doing them. I don’t need people from six different departments, including the janitor, telling me how I should organize my desk. You have to take everything with a modicum of common sense and moderation in what you’re doing. Don’t become a zealot about anything, but be able to look at a much bigger picture.

You have to take everything with a modicum of common sense.

I think there was a LinkedIn post talking about common sense. It’s that gut reaction and emotion. There are some things in there that are very interesting. It’s a cool story. We’ll talk a little bit more about you personally. I hear some little bit of Olympics and track. You must have been a high achiever at all times in all places and all things. What finally took you on the journey of MedWand? Why did you switch to healthcare? I’ve been in healthcare too, and there are different reasons why I’ve done that, but why the switch?

Do you remember when I said pure dumb luck? I started my career in healthcare. When I got out of college, my very first job was as a production control manager for a medical equipment company. I have a bit of a background in it, and then I went into consumer electronics and the rest of the history that you heard up through Red. How I got into this was an accident. When I left Red, I started my own contract engineering company. I had several engineers that were at Red and some other people that I knew. We saw a need, especially here in southern California, for a different kind of contract engineering company.

One of my engineers had been a senior scientist at Masimo. Another guy is a medical equipment designer on the hardware side of things. I had a lot of talent there, and we did several different projects early in that company, which was called Cypher Scientific, which still exists now, only it’s wholly owned by MedlLine now. It was a vibrant lifestyle company that did medical equipment, and it was cool.

We need to transition into how MedWand started, at least in order to finish this story. I knew a doctor in Las Vegas. He and I knew each other for some other business, and we were talking one day. He had no idea that I had an engineering company. He was a direct primary care physician. He asked me what I did. I said I’ve got an engineering company and we do some medical equipment and different projects. We have a lot of fun.

He said, “I’ve got this great idea. My sister called me from Chicago the other day and she has an upper respiratory problem. I tried to auscultate her lungs with a cell phone and it didn’t work out too well.” This would have been in 2014. He said, “I’d love to have a device where I could take basic vitals as I do in my office but over the internet.” I was like, “I think we could build that. Have you got any money?” He was like, “No.” I said, “I think it’s a great idea. Why don’t we partner up? You’re a doctor. I’m an engineer. All we need is a lawyer and we’re all set.”

We made a company and we called it MedWand Solutions. We spent the next 2 or 3 years going out and trying to fund it and we did. We got MIT Angels interested and that’s where our first funding came from. There’s a lot more to this story as you want me to tell it, but that’s how it started. What we started with a few years ago and where we are now is a completely different place. We talked about listening to the voice of your customers. The pandemic helped a lot in propelling telehealth ten years into the future in about twenty months.

Technology has evolved this well. What started out as a product idea for something that could be used by a doctor to examine a patient remotely has turned into an entire platform and an ecosystem that’s now a platform for AI and for other devices and a lot more because it had to. We couldn’t have one without the other so here we are.

I would add to that. It’s not a bad thing to do well by doing good. We’re going to have a big effect on people as we move forward and the healthcare landscape in general. I guess Tori filled you in on what we’ve done at the Smithsonian. We only got back from a week at the Smithsonian, and we were honored by the FUTURES Exhibition going on at Smithsonian Arts and Industries as the future of healthcare.

The recognition and the reception that we’ve gotten along the way have been so gratifying. You ask why I’ve done this. I said you shouldn’t do it. I think it’s why I become a zealot or so much more passionate about what we’re doing now than anything I’ve done in my career. That’s because we’re in a field that needs help. The delivery of healthcare around the world is a mess. If you’ve got a lot of money, it’s okay I suppose. We talked about health equity and there are billions of people who there’s no healthcare at all, let alone health equity.

Sixty million people here in the United States live more than half an hour’s drive to the nearest healthcare facility. You find a need that needs solutions. We can’t boil the ocean and solve everything, but maybe together we can. Our small part of it is important. I chose to abandon the rest of what we were doing with Cypher Scientific and move my team and everything else 100% into MedWand, and expand our footprint to an entire ecosystem that could make a difference. Not just a toy or a product or a wearable that we might sell and make a little bit of money from. It is something that could help. When you get up in the morning knowing that, it makes it all worthwhile.

I love it. It’s about the entire wellness. When you say luck and stuff like that, I was only in healthcare for a short time. I’ve been in a lot of different industries. What I did find are two things. One is someone I loved to this day because of how she was. I’m going to shout her out because I like shouting people out on the show. Her name’s Gail Lindsay. She was with the group that was pioneering Kaiser Permanente’s preventative care campaigns and things that they were doing, especially in some areas that she and I had, and some symbiotic family relations that had issues and stuff like that. More than that, she is a person who practiced what she preached.

There’s a lot of that fee-for-service stuff going around. There are a lot of people who don’t need the God complex. They need somebody who holistically looks at them and sees them as an individual that isn’t a tooth, isn’t an ear, isn’t an eye, and all that. I remember talking at the time at Highmark. We were talking about the holistic approach to that. I felt like healthcare in all is blustering. We hear Humana’s bold goal and all of that kind of stuff is very antiquated. They stay behind the times because they don’t move forward in some things.

In some things, they are just so on. I was in heavy equipment. The trucks were all shined. They were great, but the digital stuff is way behind in that area. We worked on some things that were operational excellence to get more reach to those who could have social determinants and different things just to work that way. I felt like that was a very gratifying time in my life for sure.

I know what you mean. In the medical space now, we’re trying to push the transition away from fee-for-service and coin-operated doctors, or the outcome-based reimbursement models. Medicare has done a fairly good job of motivating hospitals to modify their post-admission or readmission because they’re fined for readmission. While it’s still a fee-for-service or it is a coin-operated approach, it does affect the outcome. Devices like ours can start to level the playing field. You talk about social determinants of health. That’s level one, access, and all of that. It’s a big hill to climb but we’ll take it.

One of the members of my advisory board has a company. Here’s a guy who doesn’t need to work, yet he’s motivated to do the right things or good things. He figured, “What am I going to do next in my life? Let me take on some small things like opioid addiction.” He went out and figured that out. By using VR, they could modify behavior and affect those pain receptors in the brain in the same way that an opioid could, and has had incredible results in reducing addictions and dependencies on opioids.

There’s stuff that we can do. We just have to have the will to take it on and not let the status quo stop us. I tell my people all the time. You can never stop, or they will catch you. We keep pushing and if your motivation is to do good things, you talk about this is all about revenue. The revenue maze sorts itself out. If you can do what we’ve been talking about, which is to listen to your customer and find a place where there’s a need and be operationally excellent, the revenue takes care of itself or should.

I’ve been on the revenue side my entire life, whether I wanted to or not, for some reason. I love it. I love the thrill of seeing things grow and seeing jobs created. The widget is sometimes the most exciting part, but the other part is seeing that somebody has the ability to excel. That’s what I get off. My kids always say, “Your love language is service mom.” I’m like, “Yeah, it is,” because I like to see people growing and being able to make it. I like these small businesses to make it. They’ve listened to the customer and the customer has said, “Here’s this need.”

We talk about that all the time even when I train sales teams. We talk about stopping selling. How do you stop selling? Daniel Pink says to sell is a human. How about stop trying to manipulate and look for a need and fill the need? Once you feel that need, then the value is already there. It’s the same circular way of looking at it. Sometimes, we get so focused on, “Did you get your numbers this month?” Trust me, I’m very numbers-oriented, but then there’s the emotional aspect that goes up with that and your gut reaction too.

To sell as a human, stop trying to manipulate, look for a need and fill it. Because once you feel that need, then the value’s already there.

I think there’s a bifurcation. We talk about the CRO versus the VP of Sales. One is strategic. When you look at a revenue officer, what direction is the company going? You’re trying to identify those areas where there is a need. Now that I’ve identified a need, I’m going to pass it off to this guy because he’s going to figure out how to make that work, and the tactical execution of sales. Also, recognize when you’re in the wrong place and knowing not to sell past a close, “It’s good enough,” and be obnoxious about it.

I think sometimes those things get confused a little bit, particularly in smaller companies, because you’ll have a VP of Sales and Marketing who’s trying to think strategically or execute strategically, and at the same time has to support the tactical execution of stuff and is down in the minutia things. Now, I don’t have that many people.

The producer player does not quite work very well. We can get into that one completely. I didn’t mean to digress because I want you back on MedWand and some of the excellence that you have achieved. It’s great to go out to the Smithsonian. As we start to think of you can make money and do good, I hear that you have always done excellence, whether it’s been in growing those companies or whatever, but the track in the Olympics. Does that ring a bell?

It wasn’t tracked. I was one of the non-Olympians from 1980. Because we boycotted that year, I didn’t get to go. I’m a fencer. I’ve been fencing. I started fencing in my first year of college and I found out that I was good at this. Pretty soon, I was nationally ranked and I had a talent for it. I continued fence up into my early 50s. I had to have my knees replaced. Even now, I’d like to get back on the strip, but I have been so busy. I could only do so many things. I’m also a pilot and I have a race car. I keep myself busy.

She listed those things and I was like, “No way.”

I’ve also been fired. I’ve had financial stress in my life too. I’ve always managed to fall uphill because I keep going and do the best I can. Part of it is luck and part of it is to persevere. You had to keep on it. Things don’t always work out. I remember before I went to Red, I was doing some consulting work for a couple of years. I ended up in a little office in a company in New Jersey dialing for dollars as a sales guy. I was traveling back and forth to my home in Las Vegas.

I’ve done a couple of startups that I’ve been involved in but didn’t start or have failed, and “Now what?” I’m in this group called ABL here in Southern California. It’s Adaptive Business Leaders. It’s C-level round tables. We have both technology round tables and healthcare round tables. This came up in one of our meetings. I asked the question, “How many people in here have been fired more than once?” Every hand went up.

If you haven’t been fired, you aren’t pushing hard enough. Eventually, you are going to rattle somebody’s cage and you’re going to get yourself in trouble. I heard some of the stories. Also, in the room is the CEO of a major healthcare company whose name you would recognize. He said, “I got fired three times because that’s what we do.” Everybody is not going to end up where I did. Some of it has been by luck and some of it has been by planning. If you can be the best or try your best, it’s going to get recognized and you can come a long way.

If you can be the best at what or try your best, it will get recognized, and you can come a long way.

I’ve learned to surround myself with a great team and let them run. If you’ve got the right people, you don’t have to micromanage them. I look at my job and I always have, whether I’ve been a division manager or a CEO. You are more like a conductor of a symphony orchestra. I can’t play any of those instruments as well as any of those guys can, but I can make them all play together perfectly. That’s a recipe for success for a company.

I also had another boss who has passed away who is another great mentor of mine. His name was Rob. Rob always had the saying that if your senior staff can’t fit in a minivan, you have too many people. You have to be able to surround yourself with the right key people and let them do their jobs. You don’t always succeed at that with everybody, but on balance, the team works well together. If you got a bad apple, it doesn’t stay very long anyway.

That’s from navigating the revenue maze and having the right team. Understanding how all the parts fit together is critical. I’ve been pretty good at that over the years. I can’t take credit for everything. I have had some great mentors in my career, and you take the time to listen. I’ve realized in the last couple of years as this journey is going on that all of a sudden, I’m them. People are coming to me with it.

Now, I got to sit down and go, “What would Rob do or what Bob McClure say about this? I’ve got to come up with an answer here.” I put together this great advisory board of people who I respect tremendously, and who have wide and varied experiences inside of the medical business in general, specifically in different silos to act as advisors and listen to them. We had an advisory board meeting. I got a whole list of stuff here on my desk that I didn’t even think of. We got two ears and one mouth for a reason. Listen twice as much as you speak, and you should do okay.

It’s great advice because we have up-and-coming generations that are also trying to build new things to help solve needs. I love to listen twice as much as you talk. That is true. I love that you’re talking about it and I love the humility portion of it.

Let me talk about what you just touched on, which is my Millennials. First of all, I have several working for me. You already know Tori and I’ve got 4 or 5 in our company here. I’ll have many more as time goes on.

I was going to say, you’re going to have the next-gen.

They have a different perspective than the one I came up with and a different view of life. Where I have an intense expectation of privacy, they have no expectation of privacy. You’re a podcaster. You know this. They live their lives out on social networking, but they understand what’s going on in the world and what people think. They’re smart and they care about different things. They don’t care as much about doing better than their parents did when I grew up with them. They care more about fixing stuff and doing the right things. Along the way, they also know how to have some fun. They’re not as structured as we were. They’re brilliant, the Millennials we have here in the company or Gen X or Z.

I was going to say, whatever Pew Research tier we’re on at this point coming up, yes.

Twenty-year-olds or thirty-year-olds something adds so much more dimension to our company, but we have to stop and listen to them. We have to be very careful not to tick them off. I can’t say, “You’ve got to be here from 9:00 to 5:00.” Those days don’t exist for those guys. They’ll get the job done. They’ll work for twenty hours if they need to. They’ll work three if they need to, and you have to trust them if you have the right ones. From what I know of the young people who at least work for me, I think we’re in good hands for the future. I am hopeful.

I wouldn’t have talked about this, but I had a life lesson. It isn’t that I didn’t have a life lesson, but within your own family, sometimes you forget to listen to your family members or whatever it is. My daughter was getting married, and it wasn’t as structured. It wasn’t all the pomp and circumstance. Right before we started this show, I was describing to somebody the beauty of that event. This is my own daughter, and we don’t even have the same faith background. She is such a giver and she’s so peaceful with it. She wanted to have this wedding of 24 people. That was it.

I honored that but here’s the difference. She also wanted to have the two families blend and merge. We were together for three solid days for this wedding. After they got married, they came back from their honeymoon the night or whatever. They didn’t go on their honeymoon straight from there. The next day, all the two families did was play. We did acro gymnastics. Yes, I am in that range where that’s scary and I had to go get a massage on my shoulder from yet another 30-year-old who said, “Why were you doing that,” and laughed.

At the end of the day, it’s something that I learned back in college. I was over some kind of event, and there were differences of opinion on how that event should have happened. They went with my way of doing it. It was a huge success. The next year, they went with the other guy’s way of doing it. It was a huge success. That wedding created a memory. Weddings are supposed to be fun and exciting. It’s a celebration. A lot of times, it hasn’t been.

As we went through this experience with her because it was an experience, it was so much better than I could have ever thought it could have been. When you’re talking about letting them run with good ideas and not necessarily garner the days of saying, “Clock in. Do this.” It’s project-based, “Here’s the project. Get it done. If you work 60 hours on it, great. If you work 50 hours or 40, whatever you do on it, the project needs to be done.” It’s done. We don’t need to do that. I was so glad you brought that up. Thank you.

If you’re going to be successful in business, these are some of the lessons you have to learn and you’ve got to let go of some of the status quo ideas and structures that we came up with. We’re in a different world then, but there are still important things to do. One of the questions I know was what excites me about the future. This is part of it, but also what we’re doing at MedWand.

My father-in-law died of a massive stroke. He was 84, but what was unfortunate was he didn’t need to have died. They took him to the hospital, and they had him in ICU. He was on a 12-lead EKG. It’s a very sophisticated EKG, and it was indicated that he had AFib. AFib or stroke is the second largest killer of people in the world behind ischemic heart disease. Right behind that is COPD, both upper and lower respiratory.

MedWand has a single-channel EKG. In our cloud-based platform, we have an AI engine that can detect sixteen different arrhythmias with a single 30-second screening of EKG. Twenty percent of all strokes are caused by undetected AFib. Imagine the impact if everybody in the world could have a 30-second screening to see if they had undetected AFib on the millions and millions of people that are going to die between now and this time next year needlessly.

There’s so much to do and so many opportunities. This is one of the things that you thought about before getting up in the morning, and getting motivated. Also, motivating your people is a key part of my job. We talk about the Millennials or the young people and how to get and keep them motivated. One has to do with the work environment. The other has to do with doing good work.

I use that story a lot because it’s very personal to me that here’s a case where had we finished this device two years ago, and not been delayed by COVID and the FDA, we might have saved my father-in-law’s life. MedWand detected a heart arrhythmia in me when it first came online. My vice president of sales found out he had tachycardia that was being induced by caffeine. He was drinking too much coffee and his heart was racing. He didn’t know it.

We haven’t even started shipping yet. We expect our final FDA clearance in the next few weeks. We’ll be on the market in 2023. After eight years, we’re poised to do so much. Northrop visited with us at CES and they want to put MedWand on the International Space Station for a test in order to go with our astronauts for human deep space exploration and colonization of the moon and Mars. They look at devices like ours as key to the future. Having come out of the FUTURES Exhibition at the Smithsonian is great if we have the will to make it. It’s screwed up too, but I think there’s enough drive.

We talked a lot about Med Wand. We talked about your story, and that story is very compelling. When I was talking about Gail Lindsay and our symbiosis, we had some similar things. I love that drive. If I’m summarizing, listen and then make sure that you act in a good way to solve a need. From there, the future is quite bright. Bringing this all full circle, a lot of people want to know, if you’re working on all these things, what do you do for fun in your spare time? Is this your only fun? It is fun, trust me. Business is fun for me.

I love coming to work, but I work hard. I play hard. My single passion outside of work that takes me away is flying. I’m a pilot. We have a little single-engine airplane. To get up in the sky, we’re not thinking about work there. We go cloud dancing or take a flight somewhere. We go look for whales or something. That’s one thing. I mentioned I have a race car. I have a Corvette that I race just for fun on track day events and stuff like that. I did win the Wilwood Corvette Challenge, but it’s the same thing on the track.

When you’re behind the wheel of a car doing high-performance driving events, you’re not thinking about work. You’ve got to be focused on that next corner coming up. You could sit home and think about work, or you could go out and do something that takes a totally different mindset and focus away from what you do. For me, it causes a balance. It’s like work hard, play hard thing.

You could sit home and think about work or you could go out and do something that takes a different mindset and focus away from what you do. It causes a balance.

Although, I do love to relax. I’ve been studying to get a sommelier certificate for wine and stuff. I like to travel, although I wish I didn’t have to travel as much as I do, and that I can pick my destinations more than I do. I keep busy. I see people who slow down and then start aging badly. I’m not interested in that. I like to keep busy and keep going and do it as long as I can, and as long as I’m physically able and mentally able.

You’ll keep doing race cars and cloud dancing with your airplane. No wonder you might have some heart arrhythmia. You love all the exciting things. That is so much fun. Bob, people want to know how they can get ahold of MedWand or whatever. I’ve taken a mental note because I already know several people that I want to talk to about MedWand. How do they get ahold of you?

First of all, personally getting ahold of me, the easiest way to do that is through LinkedIn. You can look me up. It’s Robert Rose MedWand you will find me. Our website is MedWand.com. You’ll find the profiles of all of our key people up there including my advisory board. You can drop an email request. There’s an email link there that drops in on an info box and it’s addressed to me, I will get it. I would encourage people to go take a look at our website anyway because there is some cool stuff up there.

We have Twitter and all the social networking sites. You can find MedWand there. If you go to our website, you’ll see all the links. If you follow us on Twitter, when we do press releases and big news happens, we will tweet it out. The biggest news everybody is waiting for is our final FDA clearance. It’s been a two-and-a-half-year journey since we followed our initial pre-sub with the FDA, all 2,400 pages of it.

We’ve been going back and forth with issues, questions, clarifications, and additional clinical trials, all the things that FDA makes you do as a Class 2 medical device. It’s been an interesting experience getting FDA approval for a device in the middle of a pandemic. It’s taking a little bit longer than we thought and a lot more perseverance, but we’ve gotten through it now. There are lots of cool things that are going to start happening. I’m looking forward to the rest of 2023. It’s going to be dynamic.

Everybody, this is Robert Rose. It was an amazing episode. Thank you to the guests who are tuning in to this. Drop him a line in a couple of weeks and show him your support. It’s an exciting thing that he’s doing. Thank you so much, Bob, for being on the show.

Thank you, Valerie. I enjoyed it.

Important Links

• MedWand
• Robert Rose – LinkedIn
• Twitter – MedWand
• https://Music.amazon.com/podcasts/7d80f727-4d62-4d16-a0c9-96ec7bda6c6b/the-revenue-maze
• https://Open.spotify.com/show/6azAXp0qFgrmjcql0jeJM8
• https://Podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucmV2ZW51ZW1hemUuY29tL2ZlZWQueG1s

About Robert Rose

Bob has over 30 years’ executive experience in Engineering & Operations Management, Manufacturing, and Strategic Business Successes on a global scale. Through this deep experience, and an intense drive for excellence, Bob determined that there was a real and immediate need for a different kind of design services company: One that could achieve for its clients what was previously unachievable, push the boundaries of science, engineering and imagination, and turn ideas into products with unprecedented levels of performance and quality. To achieve this lofty goal, Bob assembled the incredibly elite team of the very best scientists, engineers and manufacturing professionals that became Cypher Scientific.

In 2015, Bob partnered with Dr. Samir Qamar to form MedWand Solutions, Inc. and then engaged the entire Cypher Scientific organization in the design of the now globally acclaimed MedWand device and its supporting ecosystem, gradually merging the two organizations.

Bob began his career in Medical Equipment Manufacturing and moved on to become Technical Liaison to Japan for Toshiba America. He has since held senior Division and Business Unit Leadership positions with Instant Replay, Tandy Corp, CompUSA and Systemax. Bob was also Vice President of Global Operations for Wyle Systems, where he was responsible for the execution of engineering and value added services in support of over $1B in sales around the world. For the past several years before founding Cypher Scientific and MedWand, Bob had been with RED Digital Cinema, first to lead their transition from engineering start-up to manufacturing and then as a New Technology Acquisition Leader.

Bob holds Business and Electrical Engineering degrees from the University of Maryland and Capital Institute of Technology. He is an ASQ trained Six Sigma Black Belt and Executive Champion. Bob is also a commercial pilot and donates time to Angel Flight West where he received the annual “Golden Halo Award” for making a difference in the lives of people in need. Bob is passionate about and committed to the unparalleled mission of MedWand Solutions, and partnering with his customers to help make the world a better, healthier, and more exciting place to live.

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