“Every day I receive at least 100 ideas, and 98 of them are great ideas. Maybe we can do 20. And so, what I do, very kindly, is say no to 80 people a day. But I have to explain why; that’s the information that people want.”
That’s the frank truth from BJ Schaknowski, CEO for symplr, a leading healthcare governance, risk management, and compliance software company.
And Schaknowski’s approach to leading symplr since November of 2020 has definitely been distinctive: “When I came in my strategy was ‘How can I preserve company culture and enhance the business at the same time?’”
Some backstory about Schaknowski’s start: He joined the Marines halfway through college, feeling he needed to find his unique purpose. After his service years, Schaknowski began a career in tech sales in the late 1990s, a booming era as the world prepped for the feared Y2K bug expected to wipe out computers across the world. (“Everyone had to buy hardware and software because the world was going to end,” he says.)
Throughout his career, Schaknowski worked his way through a slate of world-class software companies, including Sage, LexisNexis, and Vertafore. Focusing his MBA on sales and marketing, Schaknowski soon picked up experience in nearly every functional area of a software company.
“You have to understand the financial acumen, the workings of the overall business. The better you understand how to run a company, the better sales leader you are going to be,” he explained, a view that served him well in his transition to first-time CEO.
“If you don’t know your business inside-out, how can you expect to lead the people who are operating that business?” he asks.
Before symplr, Schaknowski had a nearly four-year run as Chief Sales & Marketing Officer for Vertafore, a company he is still enthusiastic about.
“When we arrived, the culture at Vertafore was very much fragmented, because it had grown through so many acquisitions,” he says, “And so we spent three and a half years really pulling the company together. We completely revitalized and rebuilt the go-to-market organization and achieved amazing results.”
Schaknowski had no intention of leaving Vertafore, but the company’s ever-increasing value soon meant the recruiters started calling. When symplr parent company Clearlake offered him a CEO role, he says the specifics of their ask were what most intrigued him.
“They really wanted somebody who was not only a strong business leader but also a strong cultural leader to come in and lead symplr, which is one of the absolute gems in their portfolio,” he says.
Schaknowski goes on to describe the company’s important contribution to healthcare.
“If you think about the opportunity to actually improve healthcare operations, which is what symplr does at the end of the day, that means more patients get seen, that means the quality of care is improved, that means nurses actually get to go on lunch breaks, that means doctors aren’t sitting on the sidelines during a pandemic because it’s taken them 90 days to get their credentials back after they’ve retired,” he says. “It’s hard to say we’re saving lives when we provide operational software. But if we do our job, it is a fact that more people will benefit from our healthcare systems.”
Of course, every healthcare organization had its foundation rocked by the events of the COVID pandemic. symplr’s customers have been on the front lines since March 2020 and when the virus began to change lives worldwide, symplr needed to figure out how it could position itself to help most effectively.
“We created flexible payment terms for healthcare systems experiencing a hard time financially. We deployed services for customers who needed to get a project done but lacked the manpower. We also pivoted some of our solutions to add COVID specific functionality to our access tools,” Schaknowski says. These efforts recently earned symplr recognition by third-party group KLAS for being one of the best technology companies to support healthcare customers during the pandemic.
“What the pandemic has done will in the long term be good for healthcare, because it has highlighted damaging operational inefficiencies. And there is now a mandate, it’s a moral imperative to improve things,” he says.
symplr’s culture, Schaknowski says, is energized by a level of advocacy and evangelism around improving healthcare. Many employees are longtime healthcare veterans who came to symplr after realizing how broken the healthcare system really was in this country.
“They want to be part of fixing the problem,” he adds. “We’re trying to create a technology home for employees where they can be here for 10, 15, 20, 30 years and grow their career. This is a place for those passionate people to do their best work.”
As far as leadership, Schaknowski says the executive leadership team has a mantra to be ruthless in their decision-making, but also be nice to everyone all the time.
“Because why not, right? It doesn’t mean we’re not accountable. It doesn’t mean we don’t work hard. It doesn’t mean we don’t do the things we have to do to create amazing outcomes. But why ever be a jerk about it?” he says.
Schaknowski insists symplr’s culture truly flows both from the top-down and from the bottom up. He says the company doesn’t employ “professional managers” but instead simply leaders – the kind who can roll up their sleeves and dive into the work itself.
“I believe in this concept of bi-directional communication. We try to demonstrate the top-down elements of the culture through behavior,” he says of the symplr exec team. “It’s a deal or it’s not a deal. It got signed, or it didn’t. We don’t play it in the gray. We are above the board all the time.”
Importantly, symplr leaders must also learn from their employees.
“Because they’re the ones who are getting customer feedback. They’re the ones who are seeing the problems that we have and that need to be empowered to fix them,” he says.
The company prides itself on having a constantly growing, inquisitive, and transparent culture. Schaknowski points to symplr’s recent acquisition of healthcare solutions provider TractManager – which increased symplr’s employee count by a third – as a proof point.
Upon the acquisition’s inception, Schaknowski and members of the exec team met weekly with TractManager team members throughout their integration process for open Q&A. No question was off-limits. Another acquisition best practice is what Schaknowski calls “reverse-indoctrination,” where symplr leans in, takes the good things from an acquisition, and weaves them into the existing culture.
“And so, guess what? People are still performing as a result, because we’ve been wildly transparent with them. I have this genuine belief that people will come along with you on the journey all day long, as long as they feel like you’re telling them what they need to know and treating them like adults and professionals.”
Looking at the future, Schaknowski doesn’t see a return to the old ways of working, nor does he particularly want to.
“On March 12, 2020, people turned on the little cameras they had previously had electrical tape over, and that changed everything,” he says. “It will never return to the way it was because this is much more productive. I can do 10 of these Zoom meetings in a day. If we were doing this on site, or I was coming to see you, I might be able to do two of these and a few phone calls, and there’s my day. And so, no one wants to give that up. I don’t want to give that up.”
Schaknowski maintains that the moment those home cameras went on, humanity entered the workforce – particularly in tech – in a way that had been heretofore disregarded.
“My five-year-old is home at 4:10 every day, and it doesn’t matter if I’m on an important Zoom meeting, I get a torpedo missile to the kidneys. That is not to be deterred, and I love it, and apparently so does whoever else is on the zoom with me,” he says.
That said, there will still be times when people need to gather together physically in a room with a whiteboard: “My belief is you won’t see the return of the model where you’re required to be in the office every day, but instead you’ll see something that looks a little bit more hybrid, something a little more flex. Offices will become more like collaboration centers,” he says, “and I think people love that.”
