Dave Wessinger: the GTM Story of PointClickCare ($5 Billion Valuation)
In today's episode of Unicorn Builders, we speak with Dave Wessinger, CEO and co-founder of PointClickCare, a healthcare technology company that’s raised more than half a billion in funding. Dave co-founded PointClickCare in 1996 alongside his brother. Almost three decades later, the company has grown to 2,000+ people and generates north of half a billion in revenue from over 27,000 customers with over 100 million patients seen on an annual basis. The company reached a valuation of $5 billion last year.
Here are the top 5 lessons learned from our conversation
#1: Embrace founder-led growth.
“First and foremost, they're buying you. If you think they're buying your tech or salesperson, you're wrong. They are buying you. They're buying your vision. They're buying your belief. And you are the best person to articulate that and get them excited about it. Nobody else can replicate your excitement for your business. And if you're not in market, you're losing a huge opportunity. So I must have been at every single deal for the first five years, Mike included, and I think we're, let's say, social enough, and we had a commitment level to where were going to be. And the other part that resonated extremely were just were in it with them, we are partnering with them. We wanted a win.”
#2: The Importance of self-awareness.
“My superpower would be self awareness. I think it's really important to understand. I have a 6th sense around people and for me that's I understand when things aren't going well, when the team dynamics are off in how customers are responding. I mean, some people sit in a room and feel like that went well. I'm like what went well about that person with their arms crossed kind of looking at you like they want to take your head off. What went well
And so I think it's an under- appreciated leadership skill of just having awareness of the room because when you have that you can react to that.
You can change your demeanor, you can change your approach, you can revise on the fly and really derive to a level of engagement that gets the team, the customer, the partner, kind of engaged and feeling valued. And I think every opportunity you have to engage is extremely valuable.
And as much as we want to talk about it being a transactional business, it's a personal business. It really is. They want to buy from you, right? And if they don't want to buy from you, they're going to buy from somebody else they want to buy it from. So those kind of social skills, those engagement skills that I think largely root in kind of self awareness how you behave.”
#3: Too much money can kill you.
"If I were to start a business today, I have some luxuries in life that at the time I sure as I didn't have and there's no way I could be as gritty or do things on kind of the shoestring budget that we did back then. The expectations were just a little higher.
And so I always talk about what kills a startup is a well funded startup because you just learn to be super greedy. So yeah, it's funny as I think back to those days and would I be able to do that again for a lot of reasons, no. And I think if were to take some advisement, use some consulting, they would tell us we're complete idiots to go into a market that is 100% saturated with other vendors and one dominant, you're not going to go anywhere. And we just had this unbelievable belief that we could change the game and lo and behold, we caught a wave."
#4: Make it about the mission, not money.
“Culture matters, mission matters, and if you make it about money, it'll be about money. Even though we have 1000 shareholders, and most of those are employees, people aren't caught up in that. It's about having a piece of the business, and that's more important, necessarily. And yeah, there's great value growing there, but that's never really been the focus. So I think you can get caught up in that. Being private does help in that regard. But I think for us, when we think about what we do and how we celebrate, we don't celebrate that we got to $100 million of revenue or we had this much. We talk about the lives we impact and how we're disrupting the status quo and improving the world and making it a better place, and that's why we're here.
That's the people we want to attract. Those are things we want to do. And I think it really is what you get focused on. And so if you want to be a numbers company, you're going to get mercenaries. You're going to get people that are just there to kind of and the behavior won't line up with kind of I think what you're trying to do if your mission is that noble.”
#5: Say yes to opportunities, even when it hurts.
“I remember this to this day. There was a room of four of us, maybe five of us sitting in a room, and we had one of the largest providers in the space that decided to use us, and that was taking up every minute of the day to try to service that customer to make them successful. And we recognized that kind of that word of mouth is very strong and so not getting that right was huge. And another kind of large one came in. Another elephant is like, okay, we're ready to go. And I'm like, yeah, no, we're busy. They're like, are you nuts? I'm like, yeah, we're kind of busy not doing it.
And we literally argued like brothers and it was an hour of yelling back and forth and what you do not do, which ended up with in the end, as much as I'd love to tell you, I'm a little opinion and close know brother mike was like, dude, we got to do like if we like that's going to seal our fate. Somebody else will get it, they'll be successful and next thing they'll have competition. Let's take it and figure it out. We'll resource it. We'll put a deal together that makes sense and we'll get it done. All I could think about is the work that was going to pile on my back and that kind of got me to be able a little defensive in terms of what we might do.
And so that moment where we decided and there are a number of companies I've read about that have had that exact critical moment of do we take on and sacrifice quality or do we just keep moving forward and we'll figure it out as we go. That latter one was a critical moment for us to decide we're just going to go and we're going to deal with it or we're going to try to figure it out and we'll apologize."
Listen to the full episode: