Gregg Fisher, Founder, Managing Partner, The Stem
Gregg Fisher is Founder and Managing Partner at The Stem. Gregg is a thought leader with over 20 years experience at the intersection of strategy, marketing, and technology. He is passionate about reinventing Health care customer engagement through technology, and this has been his primary focus as a consultant, executive and speaker over the last 12 years.
Before founding The Stem, Gregg was Global Managing Director of LBi Health, a 70-person multi-channel digital health agency he founded in 2009. In this capacity, Gregg led the firm’s relationships with major Health care organizations including Bristol Myers Squibb, WebMD, Massachusetts General Hospital, Genzyme and Johnson & Johnson. Before starting LBi Health, Gregg was Client Partner and Director of Strategy at IconNicholson, a pioneering interactive user experience and design boutique. He previously served in Account management roles at Nicholson NY, Modem Media, one of the first digital agencies, and BBDO. Gregg earned an MBA from New York University Stern School of Business and completed his undergraduate education at Cornell University.
gfisher@thestem.com
https://www.thestem.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fishergregg/
AUTOMATED EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Scaling Up Services where we speak with entrepreneurs authors business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service based business faster and easier. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
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[00:00:57] Welcome everyone. This is Scaling Up Services. I'm Bruce Eckfeldt. I'm your host. And our guest today is Gregg Fisher. He is founder and CEO of The Stem and they are a global management consulting firm focused on customer engagement, particuarly around life sciences and health. We're gonna find out more about the business. We're gonna find more about Gregg. We're going to find out more about their business model and their organizational and operational model. Really interesting approach to the whole world of talent and consulting and excited for the conversation. Gregg and The Stem have also been listed, I think now three times on the INC list. So one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S. I always love having fellow INC award winners on my program here, so always, always fun to have them on. Always fun to hear about their journey and their kind of growth experience can always be challenging, but also fun. So with that, Gregg, welcome to the program. Thank you, Bruce. A pleasure to be here. So why don't we talk a little bit about your background before we get to the stand and kind of understand what you're doing now? How kind of professionally and I will note for our audience.
[00:01:54] Gregg and I used to work together many, many years ago, kind of started our careers back in in New York in the interactive media as we each kind of took different paths in terms of finding founding companies. I was in technology. Gregg was on Strategy and Lifesciences.
[00:02:06] But fill us in a little bit about professionally kind of how you became an expert and focus on strategy and particularly in the life sciences space. And then we can talk about the forming of The Stem and then what you're doing with The Stem and the model that you've developed here in the new business.
[00:02:18] Sounds good. Well, I started my career in the in the early 90s in advertising. I always had a passion for communication, start dating back all the way to college. My brother was in the radio business and I knew that I wanted to go into the communications field. So I started my career at BBDO. No advertising, a traditional advertising agency. And very quickly discovered that that was not for me. I wanted something more innovative and more interesting. So while at BBDO, I was working on an interactive television trial project in the mid 90s and got very interested in the future of media, the future of communications, which then drove me to go work at Mode Media, which was one of the first, if not the first interactive agencies in the country. And so the rest of my career has been defined by the growth of digital media, digital communications from the mid 90s all the way to today. I started working across many different industries and account management went back, got my MBA and took on more strategic roles. And through that process of managing strategy, I got very interested in health care, health and life sciences in particular in the early 2000s. And my focus has been in health and life sciences ever since. First running a practice area that was focused on digital media in health and then over time grew into greater responsibility managing agencies and then ultimately founding the staff.
[00:03:45] Excellent. Great. And to tell us what are some of the key challenges when it comes to health and line Lifesciences in terms of communication, particularly around digital, like what are the the sort of problems or the challenges that you're addressing in the market for your clients? And why why does digital media become an important tool for folks that are in Lifesciences?
[00:04:06] Absolutely. So health is really undergoing a transformation in ways that we have not seen before. And it's due to the convergence of many different simultaneous trends. I'll just tick off a few of them. One major trend that's playing out around the world and in the US is that the incentives associated with health care are changing. Instead of physicians and hospitals being paid for the activity of providing a health service, they're now beginning to get compensated for four outcomes what they call in the industry real, real world evidence or outcomes. And so that changes the nature of health care in general to be much more aligned with patient health. Second thing is from strictly from a pharmaceutical perspective, due to increasing rules and regulations, the ability for pharmaceutical sales reps, medical device sales reps to access doctors has become more and more challenging. So these companies need to think about new new avenues to reach physicians, influence physicians. At the same time, we're seeing tremendous growth in the digital health technology landscape. Consumers using wearables, Fitbits and other technologies to understand their health and to manage their disease, which creates huge. Shill for health and life sciences companies. So all of those trends require advisors, consultants who can help the pharmaceutical and life sciences companies evolve their business models, evolve their approaches to customer engagement.
[00:05:34] I can see the need for an external perspective and talent to be able to come in and help not only kind of process all this stuff, but bring in best practices. And you know what's going on in the industry overall to help these help these companies figure out how to best approach these challenges. So let's talk a little bit about, you know, The Stem and how The Stem came about. I'm always curious about confounding stories and what was it like for you? Tell us a story of, you know, the beginnings. Was this a the back of a napkin in a restaurant somewhere where you kind of came up with the idea? Was it? Was it spreadsheets and business models of women? When did the the idea of starting The Stem kind of first came about? And what was that kind of founding experience like for you personally?
[00:06:11] Yeah. So it's coming from different sort of strands and threads in my life. It all coincided at the same time. One strand was sort of an increasing recognition that the agency traditional agency business model was was, if not broken, then seriously damaged and that there had to be a better way than I can get into more specifics on what I mean by that. Secondly is the recognition that the independent consultant or freelance community was blossoming and that there was a ready supply of talent available with great skill that could be brought to our clients. And then thirdly was really a matter of timing and circumstance, which is that the group that I was managing was acquired by a major agency and was going to fold us in to their conglomerate and which which created the incentive that I needed to be entrepreneurial, to step outside and do my own thing.
[00:07:06] Yeah, I always find that there's this kind of combination of push and pull factors usually play out. And these are tragic ideas, ideas that are pulling you forward. You know, that want to pull you into this new business. And then there are factors that are making it less tangible and less interesting to stay in the current situation.
[00:07:24] So let's talk a little bit about the business model, because I think that's the one of the big sort of interesting things about how you set up The Stem.
[00:07:30] And I think it sounds like it's in many respects a strategic response to how how the agency model works or the model that you were working under previously in agencies. Tell us a little bit about the model that agencies traditionally have used. You know, where you think it's broken or severely damaged or what? What are challenges they're facing in that?
[00:07:48] And then how you've kind of rethought that whole kind of process and the structure and the talent relationships and The Stem and how you're organizing and managing things in the new business?
[00:07:58] Yeah. It's it's a really interesting question. And if you kind of take a little bit of a philosophical view and you ask yourself why the company is exist at all, let alone agencies, it really the answer should be because it's more efficient to have all the talent under one roof than it is not to. And so from the dawn of business, we've had major conglomerates, big corporations providing services to markets. But over time, as technology has improved, as it's become more and more efficient to tap into talent directly in the marketplace, the arguments or the reasons for having a centralized operation start to deteriorate. And then that's very true in the agency world. In particular, big agency holding companies bring all sorts of services under under one roof. And the value proposition that they claim to have for clients is that we have access to all this talent. Having worked in the industry, though, I know that it doesn't always play out that way. Very often there's office politics, there's challenges and sharing resources across Parnell's and geographic lines. So what sounds like a great promise in reality is is quite inefficient.
[00:09:04] And so then your response as you as you kind of thought about the snowman, how you're going to organize things. What did you see as a better way of kind of creating this offering, but with a different a different model?
[00:09:14] Yeah. So what we recognized is there were a number of trends playing out in sort of the agency or consulting market. One trend is massive service fragmentation. It used to be that most of communications in the health and life sciences arena focused on the sales force channel.
[00:09:29] We now are in a world where there's 20, 30, 40 different distinct channels for interacting with health care providers and with patients in each of those channels require different skills associated with content creation, et cetera, et cetera. Are there new audiences? It used to be mainly focus on on providers. But now patients and payers or health insurance companies are stepping into the fore. So the claim that one organization can do all of this equally well just isn't as as credible as it used to be. The other thing that we recognized is that most agencies are organized as pyramid's and they have a partner or some sort of senior person at the top who is responsible for bringing in the business. But they make their money by delegating the work down to a more junior talent who are providing production services, and clients very often complain about getting sold. The A-Team and then. And getting the B-team. Meanwhile, in the external landscape, what we see is the growth of what you might refer to as the gig economy or the independent consulting universe, which is a direct response to a lot of the dissatisfaction with the agency world. But you have incredibly talented people who are coming out of major consulting houses, agencies and even client side who are now hanging up a shingle and serving as solo entrepreneurs.
[00:10:46] So what we did is we put two and two together and we said, let's build a network of independent consultants all around the world that we can package under our brand. The Stem and used to pull together consulting teams to help our clients with the challenges that they're facing. And the value proposition to our clients is seniority of talent, a commitment that the people that you meet will be the people that work on your business, specialization of skills. And because we run the company as a distributed model, it means that we can be very efficient in providing the services. So the price point is as fair. And then for our consultants. It means that they have a partner in finding new gigs, new work. We saw the loan in the loneliness factor for them. They work on small teams, often across geographies. They feel a connection to a larger a larger organization and they're not out there on their own.
[00:11:44] And you. I mean, isn't one of things I often talk about in when companies are looking at scaling and growing the business is what is their strategic focus? I mean, it sounds like, you know, some of this clearly was your background in health and life sciences. But I guess you how how much have you been kind of looking at or have you had to kind of make decisions over the life, the company in terms of where where do you provide services, where do you not provide services? What has been your kind of guiding principles are you're getting lighter or wherever you had to make decisions around what to focus on and what not to focus on and how you made some of those decisions.
[00:12:24] Yeah, I think it's always something that's nagging at us. I know you talk about this. Bruce is still sticking to your knitting and really make making hard, hard choices. We've had to do that, too. I think, you know, two principles have sort of come to mind in thinking about what services to offer or not offer. Make maybe three, actually. One is, does it lend itself to small teams of remote distributed consultants who spend a fair amount of time on the client site, but most of it is done remotely so that that immediately allows us to focus in on services like strategy, insight projects, analytics, execution, management services. So that's one filter that we use to is do I feel that I can and our management team can be effective in managing the services. Do we do we know them well enough and can we really distinguish ourselves? The second principle third principle is having a business model that lends itself to recurring follow on work so that we can open up the relationship providing strategic services. But a big differentiator for us is the ability not just to hand over a PowerPoint presentation, but to then stay onboard with the client. Help them bring onboard the right suppliers and help them manage the execution and the rollout of their projects, which allows us to be relevant and build a long term partnership with our clients as well.
[00:13:43] And it feels like it at some level, you kind of have a two sided market or at least two kind of two components your business. On one hand, you have to go out and find the clients and you have to sell the engagements and do the relationship management and that's side. But you also have to find your talent and find your consultants and screen them, filter them, retain them, you know, create the right kind of culture. I'm curious what you've noticed over the years in terms of what on the talent side, what has what have been good key principles for you in terms of who ends up making a good The Stem consultant, you know, kind of like where you find them? Like what? I'm assuming you've got some kind of heuristics that you've developed over the years because this is a little different a model, right? You're not providing you know, this is not a full time job that you're coming into an office from nine to five Monday through Friday. What have you noticed in terms of people that do particularly well in that in that environment and then being good partners for you?
[00:14:37] Yeah, it's a great question. And we've learned so much about talent acquisition. And really, I've tried to challenge a lot of the standard practices that go into into recruitment because the if you think about sort of the standard way that recruitment is done, person comes in, they have a verbal interview, meet a couple of other people. People get in a meeting and they ask the question, did you like the person you think they could do the job? And then they pull the trigger and they make basically a pretty significant commitment to an individual on the basis of three or four conversations. What we've tried to do is create a recruiting model that's much more behavioral based. We've broken it up into sort of micro steps where we initially get to know the person. We do a pretty thorough. Screen of their actual work. We put them in a situation where they have to define what their core competencies and show evidence of that core competence. And then we don't as you said, we don't hire them full time. We usually start by giving them a small project where we build them in as an adviser into a project so they can witness what it's like to deliver services. And then once they've proven themselves, they can then take on the lead role. So it's a much more sort of, I guess, evidence based approach to integrating people. And so I guess when you ask what have we learned, one thing is learned through experience, you know, move, move incrementally in growing teams. Don't move in revolutionary ways. More than that, I think it's very important in our market to distinguish between people who are ready to be independent consultants, who are contractors and people who really are seeking a short term gig.
[00:16:10] But they really want to go back to the comfort of a full time employment situation. So we've had to figure out how to identify those people who are simply looking for short term gigs, because you can imagine if we put them on a on a project and then they go back to a full time job within a couple of weeks, it wouldn't be a tangible business models. We've gotten very, very good to figure out who those people are, who is going to thrive in the independent consulting world, who's going to deal good long term partner for us and who might just be sort of reacting out of fear and looking for short term work.
[00:16:40] Yeah, kind of stopgap employment versus really, really want to pivot their career into a gig, kind of a gig model and tell me about it.
[00:16:48] I'm assuming, you know, in the last 15, 20 years, we had this kind of explosion of collaborative technology and tools and wireless and all this kind of stuff that have enabled, you know, these kind of remote distributed teams. But what are some tools or what are some things that you've learned about how to enable these teams when you're when you're dealing with folks who are are physically dispersed?
[00:17:10] And it sounds like they're spending some time on client site and are spending some time physically together. But the majority of time they're spending, you know, in remote locations doing work on their own. What would have been some of the learnings that you've had that just think this is a this is a general trend. A lot of different businesses are kind of facing this. And I'm always curious what what kind of processes or tools, technologies, you know, systems people are putting in place to enable this kind of teams working together on a project. Any insights or anything that you tried and haven't worked or tried that has worked?
[00:17:40] Yeah. And now I'll answer that. I'll also just touch briefly on the wider trend toward independent working, because it's something that's in the news right now and it's playing out on so many levels of our of our economy. But the latest stats which which may be of interest here to your audience is twelve point four million full time independent workers in what you might call the gig economy. And of that, there's about three million of them that are earning more than one hundred thousand dollars a year. What tends to attract them to this type of work is the ability to control where and how they work. The ability to pick and choose interesting projects and this sense of independence and recognition that they get. And to your point, Bruce, 4.1 million of them are what's called digital nomads. These are people who can work really anywhere that they want in the world. And we have many of them in our in our network. We have some folks who are doing work for, you know, from Europe, working on on a U.S. base project. So you're right when you say that, you know, collaboration technology is key. So my answer that would be it's as much about technology as it is about self discipline, which goes back to your question about. About people selection, people who are really committed to the independent life that you recognize that their brand as individuals, solo entrepreneurs, is tied to their responsiveness. They do a really good job of showing up on time, of clearly communicating on team calls, of doing the follow up that's needed contact notes, summaries. And that makes for me 75 percent of the difference.
[00:19:12] The 25 percent that's really about the technology. The technology has gotten so good now that webcasting or remote calls like the one that we're on right now are quite easy to manage. It's the cultural aspects of it. How do you manage an efficient meeting in a distributed way? How do you create a social exchange in the absence of a face to face interaction that I think are quite interesting? Having said that, we do have our share of Wi-Fi problems and angry dials. That's unavoidable, at least for the time being.
[00:19:43] Yeah, kind of par for the course. I'm curious from a cultural point of view.
[00:19:47] And so the technology company that I had, we we have time people, but they were located on client side for the most part. So we always had this challenge of, you know, how do we create a company culture when the vast majority of time people are working on their little project teams are in clients and we're not physically spending time together. And it was a challenge. I mean, we had we had to consciously do things around like quarterly meetings and stuff like that to kind of keep this kind of company culture and this cohesiveness together. I'm curious what you've learned and what you found and what you're doing to help create.
[00:20:20] You know, kind of the connective tissue, I guess, between the folks, you know, even if they're off working on different clients and they're we're working mostly. What have you been able to do or what are some of the things you've learned or the challenges you've had around developing kind of that cohesive company culture?
[00:20:35] You know, even if everyone's kind of on this kind of gig economy model, yeah.
[00:20:39] The way I think about our culture is sort of two overlapping circles. There's there's the stem circle and then there's your life as an independent consultant. And so we're effectively our consultants effectively acting in both worlds. They're stepping in on on long term projects in our world. But they also have their own independent brand and their own independent culture, which they have to attend to when they're not working on our art projects. So we've tried to strike a balance between a sort of a heavy handed culture building process and also recognizing that these are people who are managing their own their own independent brands. And so some of the things that we do when they're on The Stem projects to build culture are very thoughtful, careful onboarding processes. So we can share with consultants what the expectations are around their role, what the what the tools and templates are that we use, giving them access to a resource library that they can share and access materials from. So a lot of the mechanical sort of onboarding process we've worked on a lot. We've also tried to be quite active in social media and in thought leadership publication so that as a brand, our consultants are gaining access to important insights that are sort of reserved for members of the of the network. We also spent a lot of time I personally do this talking to consultants about how they build their own independent consulting practices. We have the benefit of interacting with hundreds of different independent consultant. So we've heard their stories. We know what they're what they're going through. And we can we can provide bite-sized advice for how to market them, whether they should how they should set up their companies, et cetera, et cetera. So we're trying to be a support and a supporter and an enabler of what they're doing from a social perspective when we're on projects. We make sure to build in time as a team to get to know each other and build long term, long term bonds.
[00:22:34] Now, I think that that dedicating the time, realizing that you need to allocate some of that time for the teams to just get to know each other, spend some time together, you know, talk about things other than the immediate work at hand is gonna be key for that.
[00:22:46] That cohesiveness is a good, good realization is about, you know, as as your company has grown, you know, you've hit the Inglis a couple of times. Now, what would have been sort of your learnings as a founder, CEO, kind of going from, you know, someone who was kind of the expert consultant and the person, you know, kind of doing the work to someone who is now, you know, managing the company and more kind of strategic, more kind of overall working on the company, not in the company. And at least a good portion your time would have been someone of your kind of transitions and learnings and things you've had to kind of let go. Tell us about your kind of leadership journey here and some of the takeaways that might be helpful for folks that are that are growing their business and going through similar transitions.
[00:23:28] Absolutely. For four people who are in the services field are trying to build the services business. What I found is I went through sort of especially those who are trying to bootstrap it, which is what we did. And we went sort of went through the period where essentially selling your own services, initially trying to generate enough revenue to basically get yourself billable, then getting into a step where you could surround yourself with independent consultants. But you're still playing the lead client role. You're still overseeing the project, too, then having individuals or a management team that can manage the projects for you so you can focus your time on the things that that you're really good at. And as you say, work work on the business, not in the business. And then from there, trying to scale further. So we definitely went through all those chapters. We're now coming up on six, six years. And each one requires a kind of reflection on what you're really good at. I think what what I discovered about myself is that I really enjoy the business development. I really enjoy the marketing.
[00:24:31] I really enjoy the sort of the talent oversight process, making sure that we have the right people in the network and in thinking through sort of processes that will allow us to kind of execute in a more repeatable way. So as we've grown, I've spent more and more of my time on those things and have tried to delegate the other the other pieces of the puzzle.
[00:24:53] Yeah, I always find that's there's this process that leaders need to go through to kind of figure out, you know, what are they going to focus on? And that's kind of this function of what what what are they good at, what are they enjoy, what drives value of the business. And you know, a lot of times I find I find CEOs doing things they don't like doing.
[00:25:10] I always get a question that will, why are you still doing it? Sometimes it's because well, I know so and so. And they're in a similar company and that's what they do. And I'm like, well, yeah, but they're they like doing that.
[00:25:19] They like it. I guess they do. I just always find it fascinating, the process by which you figure out what to let go, because that's really that's going to, I think, be the determiner of how quickly and how strategically a company can grow.
people than they are in those areas. So you can you can level up the organization. But yeah, big challenge.
[00:25:44] It's interesting. Interesting to hear about that process. So tell us about the future. What where do you see, I guess, where do you see this this market going? Where do you see The Stem going? What's kind of in your plan or what do you see on your strategic plan in terms of changes that are happening in the services market, in the life health and life sciences?
[00:26:00] Anything that people might be good takeaways as they plan their strategy and plan their process for the future that they should take into account?
[00:26:07] Yeah. So, I mean, I think the future is bright. I think a lot of the trends that have supported the growth of our business continue to unfold, albeit with fits and starts along the way.
[00:26:17] I think the age of more independent workers is only only going only going to grow as sort of people's relationship to work and technology changes. So our ability to tap talent will continue. I think we're at the dawn of sort of a health care revolution right now just getting started. When you think about some of the things that are coming on line with wearables and sensors and digital health products are really the shift of health care out of the hospital and into people's homes.
[00:26:46] And our ability to have the data that we need to prevent us from getting ill in the first place is only going to grow. So I think we're going to position our company to be the advisors and the source of talent to help navigate those those changes as we do. That will have to be thoughtful about one basic question that I think every entrepreneur faces is how how big do you want? You want to get? How big is enough? With growth comes a lot of tradeoffs. So this is definitely something that that that I think a lot about. But we're we're positioning ourselves to be able to to to scale in response to the demand that we see from our from our clients. So in terms of advice that I might I might give its figure out what you really are good at. Figure out what you liked like to do. Be responsive to changes in the market and have a have a clear plan for where you want to get to now.
[00:27:35] Good advice. Yes. Fascinating. I really I think you're you're definitely that's kind of this next generation employment and in particular around the consulting kind of talent base, really a new model around this. I'm excited to see how how this plays out. And I just yeah, I think that more and more companies are going to have to have some kind of model like this. You know, whether I'm sure there's different kind of flavors people come up with.
[00:27:56] But I think, you know, the day of full time, full time, fully employed for all foreseeable future years is kind of a thing of the past. At some level, and figuring out how to create a new kind of talent market and and really attracting the right people and then putting together a way of working together on this project based model is going to be really key. If people want to find out more about you, about The Stem, either plants that are looking for talent or talent that are looking for a good network to engage with. What's the best way to get more information?
[00:28:26] Yeah. So people can reach me at GFisher@thestemcom. So G F I S H.E. R at The Stem. One word STEM or they can go to the stem.com The Stem dot com one word or feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn. I always enjoy meeting fellow entrepreneurs and talking to other people who might have an interest in partnering now.
[00:28:51] Awesome. Will put those links on the show now so people can click through and get those. Gregg, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate the insights. A lot of good takeaways for the audience here. Like I said, I think you've got a really future model for how how to bring together talent for companies are looking for this expertise. Some great insights. I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Thank you so much, Bruce.
[00:29:14] You've been listening to Scaling up Services with Business Coach, Bruce Eckfeldt. To find a full list of podcast episodes, download the tools and worksheets and access other great content, visit the website at scalingupservices.com and don’t forget to sign up for the free newsletter at scalingupservices.com/newsletter.