How Thinking Outside The Box Turned Complexity Into Simplicity
The Strategic Coach Team
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How Innovation and Collaboration Created An Industry Breakthrough with David Berg
As an entrepreneur, strategic thinking outside the box will always take you further than the business owner who follows a tried-and-true path. We’re not suggesting trying out different just to be different, but a much more thoughtful approach.
Becoming a creative strategic thinker takes a special mindset and a highly intentional focus on the core skills that produce your best results. To learn more, you couldn’t look to a better role model than David Berg, healthcare industry veteran and Industry Transformer.
David, the founder of Phoenix-based Redirect Health, saw a healthcare system that didn’t work for most people in America, especially those who could least afford it. He set out to develop one that did.
In the process, he created a model that has revolutionized the way a rapidly growing number of companies in 40 states across the nation implement employee health benefits—for the good of all, both employee and business owner.
David’s story is inspiring and provides key lessons for entrepreneurs who not only want to multiply their current success, but who want to make transformational change for the better.
If it is broken, let’s fix it.
As a young kid, David realized that if he wanted to supplement his diet with the hamburgers and candy bars he craved, he would have to figure out a way to make some money, so he stretched the truth about his age to qualify for a paper route that provided him with the means to do that—an entrepreneur is born.
Trained as a chiropractor, David never really felt like he fit in healthcare. He soon gravitated to the business side of the industry, opening a growing number of clinics in the Phoenix area and employing hundreds of people.
One day, he was shocked to be hit by a huge increase in his employee healthcare costs, one for which there seemed to be no justification. He was angry and frustrated, seeing that it would be much more difficult to continue providing healthcare benefits for his growing business. It was in everyone’s best interests that he decided to make creating a solution to the rising costs his focus.
Redirect Health is the result. In David’s words, “It’s a business that makes healthcare easy and affordable. For the majority of America right now, the system doesn’t work. Even if the person can afford the insurance and the healthcare, the deductibles don’t work, the time off doesn’t work, and the complexity and confusion don’t work.
“We’ve created a healthcare solution that’s very easy and affordable, not just for the employee but for the business owners who hire them.”
With this new model in place, David has been able to keep providing his employees with healthcare while keeping the cost flat, even though the size of his company has increased.
Learn how to uncover the core strengths that will always give you your best results, just as David Berg focused his on creating a transformative model now at work in the healthcare insurance industry. Download our Quick Guide, A Beginner’s Guide To Unique Ability, and get started.
Scaling a breakthrough idea.
David never thought he’d be this excited about the solution he created to solve the problem in his own business, but it transformed everything and gave him a tremendous competitive advantage, a welcome by-product of his breakthrough idea.
More recently, David created a company where he began to spin out his model to other companies struggling with healthcare costs. He’s further created a model where companies who’ve never had healthcare can now insure their employees.
With David’s model, companies made up of minimum-wage workers like landscaping and cleaning companies, for example, where the deductibles and time off for appointments created a problem, can now offer affordable coverage to their employees. David never intended to commercialize his solution, but quickly realized that it was not only a viable product, it was a hugely valuable one.
From the coach’s POV.
Dan Sullivan, founder of Strategic Coach and David’s business coach for over 14 years, says of David’s breakthrough thinking and innovative new healthcare model, “Talk about taking the complexity within the U.S. healthcare system down to one very simple, workable, effective model. It’s like a hot knife going through butter!
“That’s David’s genius. He’s one of the most analytical thinkers I know, yet he doesn’t shy away from thinking outside the box, outside the accepted, ‘normal’ way of doing things.
“He also completely transformed the way he operates by understanding and zeroing in on his Unique Ability talents and skills. David is very skilled analytically, he also has a phenomenal ability to take complex systems and make them very simple, and he’s an exceptional collaborator.
“This is truly the secret to extraordinary success: learning to focus in on what you as an entrepreneur and a leader need to be doing, and delegating everything else to others skilled in those areas.
“It’s all about multipliers—your team and other collaborators for starters. It’s all growth. It’s all innovation. It’s all game changing. That’s what the ultimate game looks like to any passionate, ambitious entrepreneur.”
David’s three things.
When David began to look more closely at what he was trying to achieve, he knew that he should be focusing on just three key things each day:
- Analyzing where he could find greater simplicity and greater savings.
- Developing new systems that are much simpler and much more productive.
- Finding other companies whose talents would multiply those of his own.
Everything else is done by skilled team members within his company and also by outside companies who have become collaborators, companies with big systems who could use David’s solution as a plug-in to their system. This collaboration scaled his model in a way David could never have achieved on his own.
The bonus prize is more freedom. David used to spend 50 to 60 hours a week doing everything; now, everything that’s important, he can do in 20 or 30 hours. David is quick to give credit: “Dan gave me the framework for thinking and, to some degree, the permission to think outside the box when nobody else was. It kept me on track and making progress.”
He concludes, “It was very powerful for me to leave the traditional way of thinking about healthcare—actually, to leave behind the traditional way of thinking about everything.”
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