Jeff Richards With SnapNurse

Intro: [00:00:07] Coming to you live from Atlanta, Georgia, it’s time for another episode of tech talk with your host Joey Kline.

Joey Kline: [00:00:17] All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Tech Talk. I like to think that all of our episodes are great, but this one is with a really special company. This is, I think, the biggest company in Atlanta that has sort of come out of nowhere, seemingly to just make a huge impact. And I’m lucky enough to have the co-founder and chief operating officer of SnapNurse Jeff Richards with us today. Jeff, how are you doing?

Jeff Richards: [00:00:47] Doing great, Joey. Thanks so much for having me on the show. And thanks for letting me reschedule two or three times just because of my busy schedule. Appreciate that.

Joey Kline: [00:00:55] That’s OK. We’re here now. Better late than never. Exactly so. Snap Snap Nurse has gotten a lot of accolades in the past couple of years about its growth, its impact and your space loosely. You know, health care with a capital h is an often watched one. And I think the technology that you’re providing is. Has been really, really important over the past couple of years, and I think let’s just start with a broad view for anyone who has not heard of snap and elevator pitch. What a snap nurse do. And then we’re going to get into the nitty gritty of your technology and your journey as an entrepreneur.

Jeff Richards: [00:01:38] Sure. So Snapmare says the tech enabled health care staffing platform, like you said, founded here in Atlanta by my partner and I and Shree Kloss is our CEO and she was the original founder and reached out to me in Twenty Seventeen. And the idea was to create a marketplace where both clinicians, primarily nurses and facilities, could both find each other and have an easy onboarding, essentially. Nurses could rapidly on board see what jobs are available in the area. Facilities could log in, see the quality of the talent on the platform and look them either for short term or long term contracts. And so we spent two years from twenty seventeen to late 2019 building that software platform. And I should mention too, that very early on in our history, after raising seed capital, we very fortunately connected with Edward Marshall, who was the original CTO, founding CTO of the Intercontinental Exchange here in Atlanta. So this story of Snap versus a little bit of the story of Atlanta because it was the connection of two health care providers with a world class chief technology officer who had retired from the Intercontinental Exchange after they bought the New York Stock Exchange and was looking to help startups here in Atlanta. So that combination of world class technology, right, a team of developers that built the fastest trading platform in the world electronic trading platform basically helped us design and build this technology platform to match health care staff with facilities.

Joey Kline: [00:03:18] Ok, so we’re you’ve jumped ahead. We are going to talk about Atlanta. I want to put a pin in that. But but Atlanta is what I feel is that it was sort of important character in the background, almost the Greek chorus, if you will, of a lot of these conversations. Let’s talk about that technology for a second. So we gave an overview of what the technology does. Why was it necessary for those uninitiated and how hospitals and nurses generally connect? What’s the old way of doing things and why is why is that an issue?

Jeff Richards: [00:03:53] So I spent the majority of the 19 years of my career at Grady Hospital and the last 10 years I became the chief anesthetist and then the department director of anesthesia. So I went from being a clinician to an administrator, and I was constantly. There were times when I needed supplemental staff as well, and I had recruiters or account managers from staffing agencies reaching out to me. They would I would ask if they could provide me with candidates and they would fax me resumes. Now, even in twenty seventeen, I was getting blurry. Hard, hard to read faxes of resumes. I would explain that I was at a level one trauma center and that it was a very high acuity. And then I would get submission of candidates who’d been working in a GI facility for the last two years. The ability for me as the subject matter expert and knowing what I needed as a health care administrator was not there for me to easily look into a large talent pool and say, these are the four candidates I want and then send messages to them like you would.

Jeff Richards: [00:04:55] A little bit of an analogy would be the oversimplification is something like an Uber or Lyft. You have an urgent need. You go on your phone, you send out a request. It’s matching a driver who isn’t still with you and then they come pick you up. We wanted to build a platform that was curated for both sides of the health care world, which is essentially a facility that needs a pretty substantial amount of software to ensure that they’re matching their request to the acuity of the provider. And then a provider who can submit their information and get that matched up. That’s why it was necessary even today that you’re emailing documents back and forth between facilities and providers, or even some of them still faxing. And you see other technology enabled companies coming into this space because the need has been there, right? Some of them, like Nomad or Karev, they’ve been around even longer than we have, which, if anything, just yes, you see that you have competition, but it also validates that there’s a consensus in the marketplace that there’s a need for this.

Joey Kline: [00:06:03] Ok, so you as a practitioner yourself, have an issue in your day to day life getting talent you recognize there’s a problem. How does that turn from a complaint, a pain point into actually your. Jumping into an entrepreneurial journey.

Jeff Richards: [00:06:24] Yeah, so I mean, for me, she reached out to me. We went to school together, so both of us went to Emory University School of Medicine Anesthesia Assistant Program and in the late nineties, and then went in different directions for 19 years. I happened to have gone back in 2016 to get an MBA with thinking that I was going to go on to become a chief operating officer, a CEO of a hospital. And in my entrepreneurship class, I wrote a paper about a mobile healthcare staffing app because I had been experimenting with different apps in my department. One at the time was an app called Crew that allowed me to send out notifications to my techs to ensure that they got equipment to the various anesthesia rooms throughout the hospital and already saw the capacity of efficiency and just a smarter way of doing things inside the hospital. So when I look at staffing, which is the Achilles heel of any administrator, anybody listening right now and of course, who works in health care and would be extremely aware. And of course, you ripped from the headlines even this morning. As I drove in, there was a segment on NPR 15 minutes ago talking about the inability to get nurses into Pennsylvania and and onboard them through the state, which is another component of this is the ease of licensure across states.

Jeff Richards: [00:07:40] So it’s a well-known pain point that there’s not. Health care is focused on the technology to provide amazing cures, whether that’s in cancer or in surgical procedures, not the nuts and bolts of how you staff a hospital. And so it was begging for a solution like this. When I wrote the paper, I had that in mind. What I couldn’t have known is that a month after I wrote it, she reached out to me after 19 years and said, Hey, would you consider helping me out with my health care startup? And she plops it down and says it’s called Snap Nurse. It’s a tech enabled platform for booking nurses, and I said I I was not going to become an entrepreneur, but I already know this is a brilliant idea. Joined her right then ended up becoming the first investor. And that’s just started the journey of a lot of firsts, raising seed capital for the first time, hiring a whole new team of people, finding developers and getting into a marketplace and ensuring that we had success.

Joey Kline: [00:08:43] Well, that’s OK. So let’s talk about that attitude, right? Some entrepreneurs just have a risk averse attitude where it’s throw caution to the wind. Some are pushed into it by circumstances. Some, like yourself, just an idea comes along, but you can’t ignore. So you preface this saying I was not planning on becoming an entrepreneur. So is your general demeanor, your emotional and mental, you know, resting state? Is it one of someone who is a little bit less risk averse? And so you had to maybe counter that on this journey? Or you think there were already a lot of things in yourself that were, well, well placed to do this? It was just about finding the right idea.

Jeff Richards: [00:09:32] That’s a good question, I think sometimes America is all about reinventing yourself in many ways. But what I don’t know if it’s so much a reinvention is. There was a side of my life that is risk taking, it was more of my personal life because I did a ton of bike racing and triathlons and competed at a very high amateur level, traveled all over the country and and even outside the country racing where I was taking a ton of risk. Of course, we’re have crashes injuries, but that was my personal life and we sort of contained over here in my professional life. Yes, it was working in a large level one trauma hospital, but trauma by nature is wild and chaotic, and I wouldn’t have thought at the time that managing trauma and a department with its unpredictable all the time, the things they’re cruising along normally than a gunshot wound comes in in the middle of the day, you’re in the middle, you have staff who are doing a basically a lap Kohli. And then suddenly I’ve got to pull a different team and put them into a gunshot wound, which is also one of the challenges with staffing is I needed people that were that nimble and flexible and had a broad array of skill, and I wouldn’t have known at the time that that was as well suited to be an entrepreneur.

Jeff Richards: [00:10:48] Now that I’m down this journey and look back on it, they all all of those ingredients were there. I just thought that was a level of risk professionally that I would be willing to take until the idea was so incredibly right for its time. And I just was sure of that, that I became the first investor. And then, yes, a series of decisions, each of which are challenging emotionally that step away from your secure job and take risks like that to ask your own friends and family to give them money. If their money to you to invest in an idea and then feeling that excitement that they believe so much in the idea and in you that they’d actually put their own money into it. And then they have their trust in you and then, you know, you can’t fail.

Joey Kline: [00:11:34] Well, I think that’s an interesting point, right? Someone from the outside might look in and say, OK, you have a trained physician and hospital administrator, stable salary, stable job, right, jumps into entrepreneurship. That is a huge shift. And while there’s some degree of truth to that, the actual nature of what you’re dealing with in your job is extreme uncertainty in every way, shape and form. And so I think that that it’s that that that’s I think that’s a good point. Bringing that up. You can’t just make an assumption about someone based upon their salary. You know, you kind of have to look at what’s their day to day, what are you comfortable dealing with? Exactly. Yeah. Ok, one one thing that strikes me about your technology, and I think that this can be it can be a challenge for some entrepreneurs. I think your technology can apply to multiple different industries, right? Obviously, based upon the name of your company, you’re very focused on health care. But there are folks that have tried and are working on technology like this for retail workers, for logistics and warehouse workers. I don’t really think there’s been a clear winner yet anyone who’s perfected it. Is there a pull for you to use this technology for other industries or are you hyper focused on health care? And that’s it.

Jeff Richards: [00:13:00] Well, great question. We are currently focused on health care to to get ourselves to a place where our goal at the moment we have about five thousand five hundred nurses in the field and we want to get to twenty thousand. And some of the rationale for that is obviously we’ve gotten to a place of significant success that’s built on the software, a whole host of other things client acquisition, nurse acquisition and building a bigger and bigger marketplace and get that marketplace so big that then we have a bigger base to stand on to then reach out. But we are already thinking like what you just described. But one of the other industries that took off, especially during the pandemic, was trucking. And part of it because everybody stayed home. The demand for truckers exploded. Everybody’s that’s somewhat changing with returning to work. But trucking is still in an incredible supply demand imbalance, much like nursing is

Joey Kline: [00:13:57] And it has been for years before this

Jeff Richards: [00:14:00] And had this just so similar story, it was already in a shortage. And now it’s it’s a crazy shortage and the things that we do. So for nurses, it’s work where you want, when you want get paid at the end of the shift, that whole value proposition, ease of onboarding, getting matched and then taking a job, whether it’s multiple weeks or a single day and getting paid instantly is perfectly suited to trucking as well. And that would be probably the next likely industry for us to go into. As well as some of the others could be light industrial construction where you just basically you’ve got a significant imbalance of supply and demand. And if you have rapid onboarding, you’re going to be way ahead of the legacy companies that move. Slowly to attract talent and then match up with your clients,

Joey Kline: [00:14:45] It’s such a huge challenge. All of those I definitely see. You know, I mean, I’m inserting myself into your boardroom. I see multiple business lines in the future because it just it would be a shame to let this technology only be used for health care. It is so clearly applicable to so many other staffing issues.

Jeff Richards: [00:15:06] Yeah, we are in agreement. It’s really a timing thing and ensuring that we’ve. I put a really, really solid foundation in health care. Of course we have already with the success we’ve had. But taking it to that next level of twenty thousand nurses is where we want to be.

Joey Kline: [00:15:22] Yeah, OK. All right. So so look, obviously it’s it’s important for early. Of course, I call you early stage, right? And I guess they based upon years you’ve been in business. You could say that you’re really you’ve I think you’ve blown past that in terms of your success rate. But let’s just say I recognize it is necessary for early stage companies to really have a path and stay in it. So you have those goals. And then once you reach them, you can blossom into other industries from there.

Jeff Richards: [00:15:52] It’s true, it’s it’s. And we get told that all the time and you’re right, we did win the fastest growing business in Atlanta, and she got recognized as the Ernst Young entrepreneur of the year. All that happened in the last 10 months. So it’s it’s a crazy story because we blew past so many milestones so fast that it’s almost like we didn’t have time to go from early stage to, you know, we’re a big company that we have almost four hundred and fifty internal employees here in Atlanta. Well, they’re scattered around the country because of the nature of remote hiring during the last 18 months. But we have a significant footprint here in Atlanta with these offices here in Colony Square. And then we had in 2020, we had about fifteen thousand nurses on the platform and now we have over three hundred thousand and had maybe 50 working on any given day in February of twenty twenty. And now we have five thousand five hundred. It’s just a transformational scaling. And it just occurred in a very short period of time.

Joey Kline: [00:16:55] Well, let’s let’s OK. So so let’s talk about nursing and let’s talk about shortages and burnout. Ok, so we’re going to have to we’re going to have to get to the C word, OK, the COVID that has dominated our lives the past two years because it’s been a really big part of your story. I’m not so much interested in look, I think that everyone is listening to this is can connect the dots enough to understand why your service is valuable during COVID, when increased health care staffing and nurses are needed. I don’t think we need necessarily go into that. What I want to get into is. So we’ve been overburdening our health care system for twenty four months. We have been asking more of our health care providers and our nurses for twenty four months, understandably so. Just like retail workers, just like teachers, a lot of them are burnt out. And we already have shortages issues to begin with. So what? What is the sound? The alarm bells, if you will, please? What does the general public need to understand about what’s going on with the nursing community and what we should be expecting on the horizon? Because I mean, it seems a little bit scary to me, honestly.

Jeff Richards: [00:18:08] It is we’re in a very challenging period. The nurses are burned out and frustrated and and many of them are talking about quitting. And so a company like ours is definitely putting the nurses first, but we always have to think of the client at the same time, right? We have it’s a marketplace for both sides. The clients need the nurses, the nurses. If anything, they can have more control at the moment. Right. And that may only that control may only be that they can work in chunks of time and take breaks. Whereas, you know, by using a company like ours where they can take an assignment for four weeks or six weeks or eight weeks, and they might work 50 or 60 hours a week during that time and then take a break, which those breaks are critical to their mental health and preventing burnout. And so one of the other things we’re doing besides providing that platform that gives them the control of the flexibility, that’s one of the key things that they want is creating a new program where we’re reaching out to facilities to upskill nurses. So it’s there’s a shortage, but there’s a severe shortage of specialty skilled nurses in the ICU and the ED step down. Nick, you even L. And so there are the largest pool of nurses, essentially med search nurses and many facilities haven’t had the bandwidth at this time to offer training programs.

Jeff Richards: [00:19:29] So we’re partnering with facilities to upskill nurses and basically get them to training programs. This is early stage data, but we’re looking at the future. We’re not looking at the marketplace now. It’s severe shortage, supply and demand. Just being in the interchange of that is not part of the solution, it’s it’s part of it. But the bigger part of the solution is collectively, as an industry and as a country, we’ve got to educate more nurses, upskill nurses immediately. That’s something we can do quickly and putting that in place now to provide that a larger number of the specialty skilled nurses and then essentially, we’re going to have to partner with governments and educational institutions to educate more nurses. We probably need a million nurses right now. And so, you know, four years from now, when they’re done with school, we might need one point five million. So there needs to be state and probably a federal initiative that says this is a giant priority. And until then, we’re all at risk because you’re not going to have the number of nurses on staff and facilities that you need. And there may be some facilities that are and some that aren’t. We just need to be mindful of that.

Joey Kline: [00:20:39] Are what are you you personally spending most of your time on these days is are those initiatives something that you’re involved in? Is what, what, what? Obviously, look, as someone as a co-founder, you’ve got a lot on your plate, but walk me through somewhat of a normal day.

Jeff Richards: [00:20:56] And so we still are pretty deep into operations on managing and growing from 5500 to get to ten thousand to fifteen thousand. And so the day to day is certainly a significant amount of time is spent on that. The other is we are definitely I’m spending some of my time on that upskilling program to get it stood up and then looking to three, six, nine 12 months down the road. How to scale that. And so that’s that’s well underway. And then they’re early. But if a couple of weeks, we’ll have some announcements about some a couple strategic, super exciting partnerships that will open the door to new lines of business. It’s it’s building on what we’re doing, but the partnerships that can open doors that we can’t open the way we can now and probably a week or less, there’ll be a big announcement about that, which would be super exciting.

Joey Kline: [00:21:51] Well, that’s great. We will link to that as well. So you’re solving a very, very specific health care issue. Anyone who reads the paper regularly sees what percentage of health care spending is as relationship GDP. They see health care costs rising. They see issues with burnout of nurses and issues with doctors and their their own medical fields. If you could, you’re obviously working on something really important. Ok, let’s say the time and money were no. No issue whatsoever. If you could solve one other health care problem that you think would make the biggest difference to helping the lives of practitioners as well as patients. What would it be?

Jeff Richards: [00:22:46] Well, I kind of touched on the first of which is to do it would be the heaviest lift of all. So I’ll do the heaviest one. I’ll just kind of repeat it, but I’ll probably put it more stark terms. There have to be some kind of federal funding because they don’t pay the nurse educators enough money. And so they get pulled away because they want to do travel because you can make more money. So there aren’t enough schools, there aren’t enough nurse educators, so they don’t pay them enough. So you’d have to cobble together the federal and state coordination to fund the education of those nurses. Until we do that, we aren’t going to solve this problem. It’s just going to be nurses moving around. That’s one. A faster, shorter list is to. And this is the story that was on the news this morning in Pennsylvania. Many states have a compact license, and that means you can apply for one license then working 30 something states. But there’s still around 12 to 15 states that haven’t done that yet. And then you have to apply when you get in there. It turns out there’s one or two bureaucrats working in the Office of Licensing, and they because of the pandemic, they’re working remotely. They’re inaccessible. It can take weeks. So we’ve had deployments where we needed to put five hundred nurses into a state and then we run into a brick wall because we can’t get a license. So the thing that needs to happen and I think it’s just it’s fiefdoms that have within states that are saying, Well, we want to collect this one hundred and fifty dollars licensing fee. We have to figure out how to ensure that they collect the tax, whatever you want to call it, to get that license, but essentially remove that have a national license. Let’s get national standards for credentialing and licensure and create a frictionless movement of health care workers across state lines.

Joey Kline: [00:24:29] That’s right. I mean, look, I can. There are certain professions which I understand the need for different state licenses. An attorney, a real estate professional, right? Even there, there’s reciprocation, but there’s there’s different laws by state. Ok, that makes a little bit of sense, at least in the application process. Is being a trauma nurse in Georgia really different from being a trauma nurse in Massachusetts? The skill set would seem to be the same to me.

Jeff Richards: [00:24:54] Well, the thing is that you still have to have trauma skills and certifications. And you know, that’s acuity, that’s not licensure. So that’s that’s that kind of vetting is always there. The license, you don’t get licensed as a trauma nurse. You just licensed as a nurse. The capacity to practice, it’s probably closer to the, you know, it’s a little bit of a stretch. But the taxi medallions in New York versus Uber, where you know there’s a long line to get those medallions. And of course, Uber came in and crushed that. And some of that is a broken system that then got disrupted. But this isn’t quite to that level, but it’s literally just a barrier to entry. You take a national exam as a nurse and that’s accepted, but then you have too many of the states. Not all, because a lot of them are compact that you can move across state lines. They still don’t allow that. And some of those states have huge population like New York, where there’s still you can’t get in there and then there’s no there’s too few people working in the licensing office and it’s a ridiculous bottleneck in Pennsylvania.

Joey Kline: [00:25:57] Yeah, that just seems like sort of a leftover bureaucracy that is ripe for disruption. Yes. Ok, let’s talk about co-founders and that relationship. I’m always interested in the yin and yang of co-founders. You know, it’s I feel like, you know, if you if you read an entrepreneurship book, if you listen to podcasts with venture capitalists, you know, typically to talk about, it’s great for two co-founders. If you’re going to have two co-founders to have different sets of skills so that you can complement where the other might be deficient. And I’m curious how that works with you and Sheri. If there are certain areas where you yin and yang, or if you’re really you’re both just extremely aligned with similar skill sets.

Jeff Richards: [00:26:45] I think definitely personality wise, were two very different people. But then there’s a huge alignment about the way we see the industry and understand the problem. We both understood the problem, obviously at the same time, in the same way because we had the same idea independent of each other. Yeah, but Shari is one of those people who just, you know, an entrepreneur through and through that wasn’t high that I find myself, but she has always been that person just charging forward with an idea. And that is absolutely necessary. Obviously, that just driving energy that starts something. Then for myself, I think my forte is just remaining calm no matter what is happening and that maybe it was training. Maybe I was already matched for that with trauma. It doesn’t faze me to see things in a chaotic state and starting a business, founding a business, scaling a business is all about navigating chaos and not reacting. And so to have one person who’s visionary, creative, hard charging, the other person who’s extremely calm, no matter what is happening and believe me, there have been highs and lows in this business many, many times in in both regards, you can’t overreact to the highs or overreact to the lows. So I think that’s part of it. Some of it’s unquantifiable. There’s clearly some sort of special chemistry in our partnership that is part of the story of Stammers as well. But I do think that those two things are ways in which we balance each other out and together we’ve brought more to the table than we might have otherwise done alone.

Joey Kline: [00:28:27] I think what I call that is the swagger. Your reference to your generally calm demeanor call that existing in the emotional middle. And I think that it is something that is it’s something that I probably creates more than I practice, but it’s something that I strive to. I think it’s something again, whether you are a entrepreneur, whether you’re in a corporate setting, it can relate to being a spouse or being a parent. I think it’s something that we should all strive for, right? You can celebrate highs. Don’t let them cloud your vision too much. You can be upset about those. Don’t let them get you to down. Existing in that emotional middle, I think, is a place that if you can really perfect it, it’s extremely I think it’s extremely effective for your own nature. And I also think it’s contagious. It rubs off on other people. I think being a leader. People look to you to set the tone, and a calm leader in both good and bad times is a very, very important thing.

Jeff Richards: [00:29:37] Yeah, yeah, thank you. I mean, I had some sense of that before when we came here and did this when all the other noise of the people around me at other corporate setting, when I was working in the hospital, it became more apparent and the highs and lows were more extreme when you’re starting something from nothing. And so anyway, you’re right.

Joey Kline: [00:30:00] Yeah. Ok, so so let’s end and talk about Atlanta. As I said, Atlanta, I feel it’s part of the backdrop to every story that we tell on the show. Lots of different type of technology providers. Atlanta is the part of the engine behind them. So, so talk to me about why Atlanta has been such an important part of snappers.

Jeff Richards: [00:30:22] Yeah. Well, certainly we’re founded here. You know, the fact that the health care community here. So for the first two years, of course, treat, I had worked here and knew this health care community. It’s a very small world here. So we knew so many of the people we know all the hospitals, we know so many providers. And there’s a very robust health care community here. I mean, Grady itself is its own national, if not international story of a of a public health teaching hospital that was on the brink of bankruptcy. I had some familiarity with highs and lows when Grady nearly ran out of money in 2008, and then Pete Carroll came in with the Woodruff Foundation and then merged the Grady board with the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and changed that institution. And then afterwards, we went through like a rebirth, which for me was also an enormous professional education. Something almost crashed on the brink of crashing was saved. They brought in Mike Young, a CEO who turned it around. Definitely. Did a tremendous number of financial things to course correct that institution, and then John Alpert, he’s still there today, has just emphasized quality as well as proper billing and putting it all these institutional structures in place to ensure that it rose to a higher level overall.

Jeff Richards: [00:31:43] But that story of Grady, which is part of my story, is part of the story of Atlanta because the health care community needed that anchor point and Pete Carroll saw that merged the two boards and and transform that hospital and coming out of that. I was going through MBA school and wrote that paper, and then we had the perfect marketplace here. We had all these hospitals, we onboarded all these clinicians and Atlanta, and the way was our data that was the beta for two years of let’s build the technology, let’s make sure that we understand. Let’s listen to the clinicians. Of course we, as clinicians know, but things change and we need to hear everything we have to say about how the UI should work and the functionality. Is it important to get paid daily? It is. It’s very important they wanted that, so we had to build that out. That was not a small thing to build. And then, as well as the facilities, we created a particular demo environments for some of our hospitals here in Atlanta and partnered with them closely so that many ways some of the hospitals in Atlanta help us build snappers as we listen to them and through the data.

Jeff Richards: [00:32:49] And then you’re right, the c word. As the pandemic hit, suddenly everything changed and the needs. We had had orders for nurses of one or two or five or four nurses for four 12 weeks, but never an order for 50, which then turned to one hundred, which later turned into three thousand. And so orders came in that were unfathomable before, and we couldn’t have known at the time that what we built would withstand that right that there are there’s plenty of other health care staffing companies, but none of them grew forty thousand percent. And so we had an infrastructure and a technology platform that, when pointed it, orders like that we could ingest three thousand nurses in a day and then on board three hundred of them and do that over a period of 10 days and get three thousand nurses in the field now operationally. Yes, that was enormously stressful and challenging, but in many ways Atlanta allowed us it was the right place. It was like the whole city was our incubator to grow the platform, create the marketplace, prove the concept and get a really robust platform. And then, yes, one hundred year historic event occurred and we scaled in a way that was unimaginable.

Joey Kline: [00:34:04] Yeah, it’s really amazing. And the just the. Whatever you want to call it, fate, divine intervention, any other number of words, just you having the idea of Sherry coming to you at the right time. It’s it’s a great story. I think that you guys are the one part of a generation of the next great Atlanta technology companies. I’m just thrilled to see how well welcome. It’s a really, really great story.

Jeff Richards: [00:34:35] Awesome. Well, thanks, Joey, and it’s been a pleasure to be on here and I’d love to come back again and we’ll see if I get to twenty thousand nurses. I can tell you the story of how we did it.

Joey Kline: [00:34:44] Yeah, I look forward to that. Anyone who is listening, who wants to learn more about Snap knows how do they do it?

Jeff Richards: [00:34:50] Of course, you can go to our website, WW Snapmare. You can certainly look up the pace setter ward. So the Atlanta Business Chronicle recognized this last year in the April Twenty Twenty One as the fastest growing company in Atlanta. There’s some video stories about that. The websites probably easiest because we’ve captured stories on there from Pacesetter those awards, as well as the Ernst Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. And there’s a bunch of press on there where Lester Holt did an interview of our nurses back in May of Twenty Twenty One and referred to STAT vs. Operation Snap Nurse as if we are like a giant humanitarian relief organization. So let’s see the Lester Holt has given his blessing to what we’re up to.

Joey Kline: [00:35:30] What else do you need? All right. Well, Jeff, thanks a lot for sharing the story. Talk to you in a bit.

Jeff Richards: [00:35:35] All right. Thanks, Julie.