Today we’d like to introduce you to Matthew Dollacker.
Matthew, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I started InductiveHealth with my co-founder, Stephen Macauley, in late 2012 on a dare from an executive at the consulting firm we both worked for at the time, CSC. I joined CSC after being hired away from Accenture to build CSC’s Atlanta consulting business, focusing on the Federal health sector. I had the opportunity to grow this practice from just myself to a high performance team of over 80 full time employees and over $20m of annual revenue, providing a great training ground for building a business while still in the confines of a big firm’s support structure.
I found out the hard way that growing and delivering this work was the easy part. The big-firm corporate politics would soon overwhelm my experience, in effect putting a halt on my ability to grow the business and do bigger and bigger things. It was at this point that a trusted leader at the firm pulled me aside after a particularly contentious meeting with senior leadership (all of them far off in Washington, DC), where he challenged me to do it myself if I really believed in the business and strategy.
I took a couple of days to think about it, pulled in my best manager from my team and we were off.
The first year was difficult as we waited out our non-competes and slowly started to gain initial traction with clients not covered by those agreements. We stuck to the strategy and built the business on a foundation of delivery excellence and innovation. InductiveHealth was my opportunity grow a technology services business exactly the way I always wanted, without compromise.
Our growth has come from what I call A++ delivery, where we constantly strive to surprise and delight our customers. They have rewarded us with more and more opportunities to do bigger things with ever-larger mission impact. It is immensely rewarding to now see how we’ve shaped public health in just a few years, with tangible impact that likely would not have been realized without us taking the leap.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Struggle #1 was having to find and pay for legal council within our first weeks as a firm. Our former employer (a multi-billion dollar Fortune 500) saber-rattled over the broad non-compete and non-solicit terms included as part of our employment agreements. With no revenue and living off of savings while paying attorneys, this was a stressful period! Thankfully it is now long behind us, but it served as an initial crucible that cemented our commitment to make it work.
There have been many others from there, including the huge leap our first customer made in working with us, to the happy challenges of dealing with growth while keeping our commitment and culture centered around delivering beyond our client’s expectations.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the InductiveHealth Informatics story. Tell us more about the business.
InductiveHealth Informatics focuses on bringing disruptive technologies to the public health informatics arena to dramatically lower the costs of integration and large-scale analysis of health data. We tackle hard technology problems and always seek to drive tangible impact to our clients’ missions.
InductiveHealth implements, manages, and supports some of the largest public health information systems in operation today. We have focused on being 10 feet wide and a mile deep, specializing in public health information systems and maintaining a commitment to be the very best in the type of work we do.
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
I’m a firm believer that you make your own luck, but I can’t help thinking about a few situations where the outcomes could have been very different had the chips not fallen in the right way. In many ways, the bad luck I’ve had in my career may have been the more important (or at least more memorable!).
Whether it was the unexpected negative politics at CSC, having the first company I worked for out of college close down shortly after I started, or facing an overzealous general council as we were getting on our feet, each experience has helped me to arrive at where I am now. They were painful at the time, but I grew a lot having lived through them.
Contact Info:
- Address: 201 17th Street, Suite 300,
Atlanta, Georgia 30363 - Website: http://inductivehealth.com
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