October 15, 2024 • 41 mins
Justin Bayless became driven to find solutions to complex problems in the healthcare industry particularly when it came to communities that would otherwise be left behind. Relentless in his pursuit of improving the patient experience, Bayless Integrated Healthcare paved the way incorporating the most important health care services under one roof: primary care and behavioral health. In 2018, Bayless Integrated Healthcare also became one of the first provider groups in America to be designated as an Utilization Review Accreditation Commission (URAC) accredited telehealth provider.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to another edition of CEOs You Should Know Phoenix.
I'm your host, joe Yaylor. Very pleased this time to
be joined by the managing principle for Bayless Ventures. He's
also the founder and president of Journey Venture Studios. Justin
Bayliss joins us here and CEOs you Should Know.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Welcome, Justin ay Man, Jody, happy to be here. Thanks
for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Oh Man, we got a lot to talk about. You
have a really impressive background with a lot of success
in a lot of different areas, and a lot of
that started in healthcare. But for you, your journey, you
started with an interest in finance, and then there comes
healthcare and mental health and then entrepreneurialship. So let's start here.
How did you figure out you wanted to be a
(00:39):
kind of a mover and a shaker, a CEO and
somebody who's building and launching as your career path.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Yeah, I mean, I think most entrepreneurs would say that
they kind of knew at an early age that they
thought a little bit different. So for me, both my
parents instilled hard work and education at an early age,
but I caught myself always throughout my matriculation and education
doing some type of entrepreneurial journey. So I got suspended
(01:09):
from middle school for selling candy out of my locker.
You know, they actually thought I was selling drugs, I think, but.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
What kind of candy?
Speaker 2 (01:16):
So I would have my mom take me pop rocks? Okay,
my mom would take me. I would figure out ways
to work at my father's office. Okay, so this hard
work process in his mental health clinic and would earn
a dollar an hour, and I would take that dollar
and then go to Costco at the time and buy
in bulk. And then I would realize, like at school,
(01:36):
there was no candy available, So I'm like, huh. I
realized that at the closest circle K to the school,
we would all try to go after school and get
some type of candy. And then I saw the prices
at Costco and quickly realized that I can make a
little bit of a profit by buying in bulk, taking
it to school, and then selling it because at the
time there was a no candy policy. So I decided
(01:58):
to go ahead and take that entrepreneurial journey. And yeah,
I definitely got suspended for a couple of weeks for that.
My parents actually, I really appreciated my parents because they
told me I did break the rule, but they appreciated
my prowess and all this. My mom started asking a
lot of questions about rotting my teeth when I was
bringing home this candy, but ultimately, you know, they were
able to support that. And so my mom actually then
(02:20):
put me in summer school and personal finance and helped
me start to learn what, you know, managing stocks in
a portfolio would be at eleven. So I had parents
who really kind of saw my I think aptitude towards
certain things, and ultimately that led me to want to
become a finance professional and started my first career at
(02:41):
Morgan Stanley on Wall Street and investment banking division. And
my father started to get a little bit older and
started to call me about this mental health industry and
how unsophisticated it was and how I was lacking so
much information to the public about how it could change
people's way of life, and him being a mental health
professional his whole career, he really was like, there's so
(03:02):
much opportunity to bring some business acumen into the space
and try to figure out things differently. And so around
six oh seven he had like this Motorola flip phone,
and as we were kind of talking before the show,
I was driving back with him from Tucson to Phoenix
and he looks at me and says, one day, on
this Motorola phone, people are going to be able to
(03:23):
see each other and do this virtual business. And I said,
I think you're out of your mind if you think
I'm leaving Wall Street to come back to you know,
our mom and pop five employee, you know, mental health
office in Phoenix. And he looks at me and to
his credit, says, you know, you call yourself this big
Wall Street businessman, and you know what other business in
(03:44):
the world, the bigger it gets, the more people you help,
and your names on the sign as a source of pride.
So what kind of businessman would you be to not
pay attention to this and come back and take a
shot at building the family business. And that's how I
actually got the bug. And I said, you know what,
I can always go back to the world of finance.
I performed in my college studies. I did very, very well.
(04:06):
You know, Morgan Stanley has hired me. You know I
can always go back to this, So why not take
a chance now when I'm young at twenty one years
old and take a shot at this and see if
I can help my father and help my family and
help other people. And so I left March of eight.
I resigned from Morgan Stanley at this timing right, and
came back to Phoenix and the rest is history.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
It's a pretty unique origin story, right, because I feel
like a lot of the CEO or entrepreneur stories, particularly
once I hear on this show and elsewhere, it's a
it's for whatever, it's a passion that they're immediately consumed
with that they start and they found this was a
powerful personal kind of plea from your dad that was like,
you can do something here. And how did you Were
(04:50):
you conflicted in that at all? Were you, hey, I
kind of want to do my own thing or did
you kind of recognize in real time what it meant
to your dad and your family?
Speaker 3 (04:58):
And that was like an immediate light bulb.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
So legacy has always been important to me, understanding history,
and I think that that was important. But I grew
up in this clinic. So at nine years old, you know,
my parents put me in a shirt and tie and said,
if you want to play basketball, you need to go work.
And so I every summer after high school, I would
walk back to the clinic. So I knew every administrative
(05:21):
job by the time I graduated high school. I knew
how to do the billing. I knew how to run
the front desk. I knew how to score MMPI, which
is a certain assessment that psychologists use. I knew how
to do everything in that office. So when he put
that opportunity in front of me, I said, you know,
there's few things in this world that I know better
than spending all of those countless hours than in that building.
(05:42):
And now I've learned this world of finance. I raised money,
helped raise money for companies. I really had learned a
new skill set. I said, what if I could bring,
you know, this administrative sophistication and background and accounting and
finance to a world that quite frankly hadn't had that.
And then I started thinking about, Okay, technology is changing.
Is there a way that I could bring a new
(06:02):
technology into this practice that could totally disrupt it? Why not?
And his whole thing around, you know, producing value that
helps someone else right at the same time, can help
your family, spoke to me. Especially working on Wall Street,
where you're buying and selling off of others that really
just spoke to me. And so, you know, I don't
think I ever had the inherent bug to do the
(06:24):
family business, but I knew that those things all spoke
to my values at the time, and that's something that
was very interesting to me, and I took the risk.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
I'm curious when you went through this with your dad.
I'm sure and I can tell immediately that you have,
you know, profound respect for your family and that means
the world to you. But did did you look at
your dad differently after that conversation? You know, if my
dad was telling me like, hey, we're going to be
on the phone. It's a motorol, a razor flip phone
or whatever like that. Okay, all right, all right, crazy
(06:54):
old man, like whatever, do you when you've gone through
this and you've built your career and you've seen where
it's led, did it change how you viewed your your dad,
your own dad?
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (07:06):
And I mean in most entrepreneurial businesses, you have something
that's called the visionary and the integrator, right, and you
have somebody who understands kind of big picture the space
and has you know, grandiose ideas. My father was a
savant in terms of providing mental health services. He was
one of the first to actually create a program that
sent people out to individuals and patients' homes. Right now
(07:27):
we think about house calls as being nothing well for
mental health. He was really revolutionary in that. So he
knew his craft. What he didn't know, because he never
had any business training, was how to operationalize all of
the things that he had.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
In his head.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
And so I think the combination of me understanding the
nuances of the business, him being a clinician, and we
had that unique ability back and forth between one another,
and that transition from father and son to father son
and partners was a real step that we had to take.
And I tell a lot of entrepreneurs and family business
one of the hard what's things to do when you
(08:01):
have a generational change or generational difference between the partners,
whether it's father son, mother son, mother daughter is the
younger partner has to immediately put wins on the board
to gain the respect of the older partner or the
generational leader who started the business, or you're going to
always be in a constant chaos and conflict. So I
(08:27):
knew with him that this was his baby. I was
not a PhD clinician, right that I had to respect
his craft and his needs, but put wins on the
board so that he would listen to the things that
I wanted to change and transform. And it's not rocket
science here, but a lot of people just think that, well,
I can come in and do this with my parents,
or my family, or my brother or whoever it might be.
(08:47):
And I think that's a recipe for disaster. You have
to first create that commonality understanding, put the time in,
and put wins on the board, and then you can
start to transform.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Back around us in sports hosting a sports row, and
I know you and your family have a tremendous connection
to the world of sports. That's what it sounds like.
When you're a first round draft pick or a rookie
and you're coming to a veteran team, you have to
earn Lebron's trust. Whether it's Browny Junior or it's Austin Reeves,
you have to earn the trust of the older, accomplished
(09:20):
veteran And that sounds like how you had to approach this.
So it's an incredible story right there. But let's pick
it up from after you come and you join the
family business and mental health. What were you able to
succeed in doing? What were what kind of work did
it take and what were the results? Yeah, so so
real quick. And by the way, we can talk about
this later. There's a lot of parallels between entrepreneurship and sports, right,
(09:43):
and we will get into that in what we're building now,
taking a lot of parallels out of those worlds. But
the first thing in the Family Business, it was just
a children's medicaid clinic, so focused on you know, children
eighteen and unders that were low income and providing services
to them and their families. What I quickly REALI from
working you know with Morgan Stanley, we're doing a lot
of consumer segmentation towards baby boomers at the time, right,
(10:05):
baby boomers were going to be the largest population.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
You know, how how is the world preparing to take
care of these baby boomers? So the first thing I
wanted to do was figure out how do we put
a service together that levers our same competency for kids
that we could do for geriatrics and older adults. And
first to do that, we have to have an administrative
infrastructure that allows us to understand our cost our units,
I mean, all the things to understand how the business functions,
(10:29):
which at the time loved my father may rest in peace.
He only had a Quicken account with income and expense
in green and red. That was our administrative system, okay,
and he had a payroll company which was paychecks at
the time that he paid payroll. So I first had
to go back and do a full audit of the
business and understand over you know, thirty years of practice,
(10:49):
what were the unit measurements in the business, understanding how
it functioned, and really put together you know, financial statements
for the company. From there, I understood the union economics,
and then I could go out and build these new
business units. And so what we did is we.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Partnered with.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Managed care organizations in the Phoenix area and found that
there was this real gap in the market where people
were not providing comprehensive mental health services and skilled nursing
facilities and assisted living facilities. And I quickly realized, like
this is a growth area. We needed to find some
clinicians who had that training, which my father and I
partnered together to find and we went out hired him.
(11:26):
We went from five employees to about forty five employees.
In eighteen months, Wow grew a whole new business line
that was putting the wins on the board right and
it was profitable. Unfortunately, after that eighteen months, my father
in the middle of the night had an unforeseen heart attack,
oh Man, and he had to retire.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Overnight.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
They had actually revived whom he actually was pronounced dead.
They revived and brought him back. Took him quite a
while to even get back on his feet. So at
twenty four years old, I was handed the keys to
this car that most of the staff were still hired
to him as CEO.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
So no, you're in charge at that point, you are
effectively running the entire organization.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Jody.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Literally overnight, we were trying to make sure he could revive,
to sign the papers to transform us from a professional
corporation to inc. So that I could actually run the
company because I was not a clinician, So we literally
had to you know, transform the actual legal entity and
make sure he could sign off on that where the
company wouldn't even be here, we wouldn't be having this
conversation he was able to come to, we signed the papers,
(12:24):
I took over, and immediately behind when I took over,
I started to find that one of the biggest benefits
from our service delivery with old adults was that we
were lowering the overall total cost of care for these
really chronically elderly patients. Okay, so when we brought in
mental health services to a patient who had a co
(12:45):
occurring issue let's call it diabetes, and they were depressed
and they're in these facilities, the medical cost offset to
the payers to the nursing home to that individual were
a two percent.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
And that started to spur this idea my mind in
twenty ten, like, why do we have these bifurcated systems
in this country that say, if you're a medical patient,
you need to go through this store, If you're a
behavioral health patient or mental health patient, you need to
go through this store. And you have these payers and
it was just totally separate and distinct, and they didn't
talk to each other. Yet the mind and body is one, right,
the clinicians want to work together and figure out solutions.
(13:21):
A PCP, a primary care provider, wants to understand what's
going on with this person's mental health to be able
to control their medical and vice versa.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
So well, my dad's rehabbing.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
I decided to change the whole company.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Do you run it by them?
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Is yeah, So I run it byom and I say,
you know, this is the you challenge me to come
back from Wall Street and said you wanted me to
use my tools. This is the vision that I have.
I called it integrated care, which now people start to use.
And you know I.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Should have trademarked that phrase.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
By the way, Well we're a little late for that now.
But yes, and I think there's a way we can
do this under our umbrella and do it for all popular,
not just kids, not just older adults, but every person.
And this will make mental health accessible because there's so
many barriers, whether it's stigma, whether it's cost, whether it's transportation.
If we combine these services and someone walks into one
(14:13):
building and they know that their total health can be
controlled and monitored and managed by someone they trust, it'll
be a game changer.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Cuss me out. Oh really not happy. Cuss me out.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Said, you know, you know you are coming into a
world that this has been tried before. You don't understand.
I mean, you gotta understand. He was literally on his deathbed,
he sees his young son who's in the middle of
his twenty saying, hey, you're going to take his baby
and totally change it. He was very frustrated.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
And pissed off.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
So I had to come back to him and challenge him,
and I said, you know, you called yourself a clinician,
a healer for all these years you challenged me to
come back from Wall Street. It is the who of
you to now allow me this opportunity as you challenged
me to come back before. What kind of clinician would
you be if you didn't allow me to do this?
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Well played, that's a nice chess move on the chess board.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
So he cussed me out again, called me back and said,
put a business plan together and let's talk about it.
And so in twenty eleven, I put this business plan together.
He said, how are we going to pay for all this,
because you know we're a small, small company. I said,
we're going to have to take out a loan, which
means both his house and my house we'd have to
put up as collateral. And now, mind you, he can't
(15:26):
work anymore, so if this goes bad and we go bankrupt,
he's in real peril.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
He was unable to return to work. I was not
unable to return to work.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
He was disabled at them, and to his credit, we
went to JP Morgan Chase and we did a three
million dollar SBA loan and put everything we had on
the line for this concept. We almost went bankrupt about
three times. He was ready to kill me a lot.
But towards twenty fourteen we started to see it work.
(15:54):
So it was a three years of this just working
through it.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
What is Let's dive into that for just a second,
because I think this is where so much of the
story for a lot of would be entrepreneurs or in
the process of it, that three years of struggle.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
What does that look like? What does that feel like?
What is what is that experience like?
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Yeah, So, first and foremost it was creating the strategy
for implementing this. So how are we going to create
new facilities like infrastructure that we're going to change the
actual operational workflows for a patient to walk into a building,
which now seems like rudimentary, Like you're like not even
thinking about this. Back back then, though, mental health facilities
you ever visited them felt like prisons. They were not
(16:34):
they were not well built, they were not nice.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
We said, one flew over the cuckoosness was the entire
country's idea of mental health.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
It's been very behind for a long time. So we
first had to create what was our brand, what was
our image? What were we going to have workflow? So
it felt like something different for the patient. And then,
by the way, we were a mental health company for
a long time, we didn't understand what primary care needed.
So we had to find primary care partners who, quite frankly,
were like, I don't want to necessarily deal with patients
who have this all day. It makes my work harder.
So we had to convince them that working side by
(17:02):
side with a psychiatrist or a licensed professional counselor would
be a better part for their practice, and that's a
hard thing to sell when you're not a clinician. Then
we had to figure out, okay, how do we get
paid for this right? How do you get payers who
have historically been bifurcated to say, yes, we are going
to pay for more utilization of care, which managed care
(17:22):
means they want to manage the care and don't want
to necessarily overutilize. So it was years of working through
different components, of trying different things. We ultimately use some
of the loan funding to acquire a pediatric clinic, which
brought in eight thousand kids into our umbrella, and that
really gave us a large enough sample to show the
value set of this kind of pilot, so to speak,
(17:46):
and that went live July one of twenty thirteen. At
the time, the pediatric clinic had around five thousand Medicaid
children that were in their practice, and when we did
an overlap of the behavioral health utilization, there's only two
hundred of those five thousand MEDICAI kids whould receive behavioral
health services.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Literature says forty percent of Medicaid children have underlying behavioral
health issues. Within four months, we had twelve hundred kids
who came on to our roles. That was like our
proof point, right, So by the end of twenty thirteen,
we're like, okay, there's definitely the need here. We figured
out a way with the workflows, we're figuring out the facilities.
Now we need to figure out how to get paid.
(18:24):
And we started to transition into more adult services. So
before the opioid epidemic became big, we said, you know what,
what about adults who have these issues and they're using
because they just don't know an escape. What if we
created the same program for adults. So we did that,
and then that started to grow, and so by the
time we get to the end of twenty fourteen, we
(18:45):
now have a pilot set of young children, right teenagers,
these adults who have these really co occurring substance use disorders,
and older adults that are chronically ill. Right in today's
world in healthcare, when you say you're having these populations,
it's like a researchers the State of Arizona started to
take note of what we were doing at the time,
and the Medicaid director started to ask us questions about
(19:06):
what we were building, and we went and presented to
them some of our data and research and what we
had put together, and by the end of twenty fourteen,
they announced that they were going to start to transition
the State of Arizona's Medicaid plan to start to look
at how these systems become integrated. So by we get
to spring of fifteen, we're now saying, okay, which I
left out portion of this. We started testing telemedicine in
(19:28):
twenty ten. We kept building technology enablement through all of this.
Spring of twenty fifteen started to work. Finally we started
to turn a profit. My father comes into me and says,
you finally figured out this integration mess. And he pulls
out this phone again, brings it up and says, I
told you about this phone.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
It's time. Remember that moment. Oh.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
He's like, I told you about this phone, and now
the iPhone is out there. He's like, you need to
get this on this phone. And I said done and
said I'm on it. So I start to really put
some emphasis into mobal Health is what we called it
at the time. And I'm driving to a meeting in Gilbert,
this company here and locally called evisit at the time,
to go meet with them to look at their delivery system.
(20:10):
And I get a call from my mom. My father
had a second heart attack and he died that day.
So he saw us where maybe eighty employees, seventy five
eighty employees. This is June of twenty fifteen. And after
he passed away and we got through all the kind
of minutia of grief and all the stuff that comes
along with losing the leader of the company. To me,
(20:34):
that was like the energy that really pushed me to say, okay,
we figured out integration. But now let's figure out this
technology solution. So over the next three years we continue
to build out more facilities. So by the time we
get to COVID, we now have nine facilities through the
Phoenix area. We've got also where the first UAKA credited
telehealth company in Arizona, where the first ten in the nation,
along with teledoc American, well all these other companies now
(20:56):
that you see online Betterhelp that are telemedicine providers. But
we were just very well prepared and had had mastered
kind of this art of having facilities and technology enablement
for people when they need to come into facility, we're
there for you. If you want to do a virtual visit,
we're there for you. We figured out how to make
it safe, effective, reliable COVID hits. You know, the rest
(21:18):
is kind of history. At first, I was kind of distraught,
like We've put all of this into this thing and
now all of a sudden, we're shutting down facilities. And
it just clicked like this was the adoption moment that
he wanted. This the adoption moment that I had been
building for. And we quickly had a management meeting ordered
as many laptops we could get our hands on, and
decided to go all in, and you know, we marketed
(21:39):
here on iHeartMedia and everywhere else saying hey, we're available
for you, you know, Arizona market during this tough time.
And after about a few weeks that adoption just really
kicked in and we started to grow dramatically. And that's
when I knew we needed to find a partner to
really take our business to the next level. So I
called Morgan Stanley back, and I called my former boss
(22:00):
and said, I've been waiting to make this call for
quite a few years. And her name's Carla Harris. She's
an award winning singer. She was a vice chairman of
Morgan Stanley. I mean, she's legendary in Wall Street. And
I said, you know, I would be curious if you
guys be willing to look at what I've put together
because I need a strategic partner to take us to
the next level. I think I've maximized what I can do.
(22:21):
And she said, Okay, I'm gonna put you in front
of an investment banking division and see if they want
to take you on as a client. Presented an investment
making division, they took us on as a client during COVID.
Mind you, I also have three kids under two in
this time period, and we basically do a road show
and present to all the major private equity strategic partners
across the country. And by December of twenty twenty, we
(22:45):
had inked a strategic partnership with a Fortune five hundred
called Magellan Health, who at the time was the largest
publicly traded in mental health company, and decided to go
that route in the future. Three weeks later, we found
out Magellan was getting acquired by another company called Senteen Corporation,
and that changed my plans a little bit, and ultimately
I had to leave the company in January of twenty
(23:07):
twenty two. And we can talk about now kind of
the future direction.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
Of what we're going to do. Right.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
I'm sorry for the loss and your dad, and that
sounds like an incredible just powerfully positive force in your
life then now and for your kids and the entire
generation of the Bayliss family. An unbelievable kind of circular
story there, right, And now, as you mentioned there, all
those lessons, all of those successes, all of those challenges
(23:37):
in new ventures. Yeah, and what you know, Bayless Ventures,
what is the mission, What is the goal? What is
the kind of driving force behind some of your new
including Journey Venture students, which we'll talk about here in
a few minutes as well.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
So I think, first, for anybody listening to this, I mean,
if you're paying attention, the US still lags all of
our peers in terms of healthcare delivering the world on
every indicator. Even in Arizona, where we sit today, we
have significant health care disparities for certain populations that still
are not solved. I learned a really valuable experience when
I sold the company and transitioned out, and I tell
(24:15):
it quite often, is that those usually who are making
a lot of strategic, large decisions are so far away
from the actual problems that it's hard for them to
create the solution. And I think our health care solution,
or excuse me, our healthcare system has done a disservice
by having all of these layers of functionality and bureaucracy
where eventually the problem goes so far away from those
(24:37):
who are making the decisions it's impossible for them to
truly understand it. So first and foremost, I believe that
those that are closest to the problem are the best
ones suited to solve the problem. I told you about
my story, right, growing up in the clinic, I knew
how to speak the language of mental health. I knew
all the acronyms of mental health.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
My parents at the dinner table as kids, used to
talk about our own mental health. So for me was
a natural progression that I understood the true essence of
the business, so I could innovate within the business without
having to take years and years and years of understanding
the underlying business itself. So I think that's first and foremost.
I think second, if you look at the healthcare industry,
(25:14):
we are still the third largest contributor to GDP in
the United States.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Right.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
It is a humongous industry. It's not very sexy for
a lot of young entrepreneurs, which is part of the problem.
Like who grows up and says I want to one
day be a healthcare administrator of a clinic.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
I've never met anybody.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Very few people have that intrinsic. So what happens, which
is this is not a slight to anybody out there,
This is just fact. Right. A lot of folks who
are in the clinical realm go through the clinical path
and then transition into the operation or business path and
a lot of the time that's a different right brain
left brain way of thinking. And again I told you
(25:51):
about the unique ability of my father and I partnering together, right,
and having that unique ability ourselves where we're both talented
in different areas. So I think that's second, there's a
huge opportunity. It's only costs are only increasing, like we're
seeing that more and more, so we have to find
a solution. I think the third thing, if you really
look at then we're going to more of the underrepresented, right,
(26:13):
communities that are disadvantaged. Capital does not flow to those
communities in the way it flows to other communities. So
less than two percent of all venture capital dollars or
risk capital is what it's called, right, No collateral right
goes to underrepresented founders. Right, So less than two percent
women in this country are fifty percent women get less
(26:34):
than one percent. Okay, So we have intrinsically an issue
where capital is not flowing for the innovation to certain sectors.
Speaker 3 (26:42):
Right.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
And I can get into this whole philosophical conversation about
we all have to pay for health care in one
way or another. It's going to end up in correction,
it is going to end up public well, it ends
up in places.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
So if you take those three things I just mentioned
understanding my background, I was successful. I had to exit,
you know, I had resource. Was from this exit, I
quickly started to do more research again about some of
these problems and said, how can I best use my experience,
my resources to try to solve these problems going forward?
(27:11):
And the first thing I did was called back Carla
Harris at Morganstein and I said, I have an idea
about how I can get involved in venture capital, and
she said, get on a plane in New York right away.
So I go out and meet with her, and she's
talking to me about she started this fund at Morgan
Stanley called the Next Level Fund, and then the Next
Level Fund is a technology focused fund that works with
(27:33):
underrepresented founders backed by Microsoft, walmart Hurst Media, Morgan Stanley,
and they didn't have a healthcare champion to help them
with the fund, and she asked if I'd be interested
in getting involved. I could learn I could be involved
with operational due diligence with the founders, and I said, absolutely,
this is right up my alley. So starting to work
with them. I started to say, well, what else can
we put together in Arizona that can try to solve
(27:55):
some of this as well? Because as I made the
rounds in the Arizona VC community, it looked very home
a genius and I said, that's not representative Arizona, that's
not representive my hometown. How can I bring some opportunity
to those who want to try to disrupt healthcare as well?
And so I pulled together a group of people in
the space and had a sum in Flagstaff, Arizona in
(28:15):
July twenty twenty two, locked everyone in the room for
the weekend and said, what can we do together a
lot of really smart people, what can we create? And
so out of that we created really two pathways. One
is one company that I still lead to this day,
is called ten Figures. Ten Figures is an asset management
and advisory firm, and an advisory component is really helping
consult early stage healthcare ventures and those founders on how
(28:39):
to move through this process, that life cycle I told
you about again. I took SBA loan. A lot of
founders don't have the ability to do that, especially in
the market environment we're in today. Interest rates now are
coming down, but interest rates are still significantly higher than
they were when I was growing the business. So that's
not an option for them to go and get collateral
and be able to to finance their actual business. So
(29:03):
they need VC dollars. So how do I help them
create an environment that can prepare them to take on
VC dollars. It's one entity. Second entity, which is really
my family's foundation and giving is in legacy plays called
the Journey Venture Studio, and the Journey Venture Studio really
gives underrepresented founders who are talented, like extremely talented, an
(29:25):
opportunity to build a startup that they had a lived
experience in healthcare specifically, whether it is mental health, women's health,
aging and elder care, chronic disease management, sports medicine, or
even packaging and supply chain for healthcare. They have to
have a lived experience, they have to be talented. We
will give them the footing to come to Arizona and
build the business from scratch.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
So this is your casting and net across the country.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
It's a national search. This is now our second cohort
actually just started last month, and you know they actually
have to come here and it's kind of like I
try to tell people to explain it, think a real
world meets Shark Tank. Okay, we move them here, we
put them up in an apartment, we help with their
(30:10):
basic living needs, but we build the businesses with them,
so they have to have that lived experience and say, hey,
I noticed that in my family we really struggled with
chronic elder care for my grandparents. And I see this
really being an issue going forward in the future. I've
graduated from Wharton MBA. I have all this student dead.
(30:32):
I want to take this chance to actually go and
solve it, but I have all this debt and this
consulting job is going to pay me. How am I
going to be able to do that when I'm the
first one in my family to really graduate. That's the
type of founder we're looking for, right, And to bring
them in and say, hey, you've had this lived experience,
you're talented, you've done everything right. Let us help you
with that footing, and let us help you go and
solve this issue. Because you were closest to the problem,
(30:54):
we believe you understand the problem better. We can help
you with all the venture building, we can help you
with the playbook, we can give resources and networking, and
we can introduce you to capital, but it's up to
you to really come in and put that work together.
We're just giving you that family and friends around that
you don't have.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Has that been I immediately think because in radio we're
always talking about targeted audiences, and some audiences are easier
to reach than others. Is that an targeted audience that
is difficult to reach? Is the message? As you mentioned,
healthcare is not the sexiest industry, but it's one that's
arguably the most need for almost the most benefit across
(31:32):
the country. How do you attract those people that you're targeting? Yeah,
I think we've been I think getting the word out. Initially,
people are like, what is this right?
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Like, what do you mean? Like you're going to create
this venture studio that ultimately is putting all of these
programs and services and kind of the support systems. Mazov hierarchy,
which is another part of my mental health upbringing, understanding
how important that is for people, Right, what are you doing?
What are you talking about here? It resonates with me
because when I first said I was going to put
a mental health and a primary care physician in the
(32:03):
same office, people also say what are you doing here?
You want to put technology? What are you doing here?
The founders are now starting to understand how amazing of
an opportunity this really is. Right, It's very rare you
find a studio that gives the full breadth of venture building,
which there's a lot of venture studios in the country, right.
(32:25):
Venture studios are not a new concept. The difference though,
is that venture studios historically are a fund that has
been raised to find founders to go out and build
these businesses together. Right, But the founder ultimately gets like
a minority portion of the equity and the fund gets
the majority of the equity. We're a nonprofit five oh
one C three that's doing this to say, hey, we're
(32:45):
giving you the opportunity. We'll be your partner in this,
but we're not an investor. Right, You're keeping the majority
of the equity. This is your thing. We're really just
giving you the opportunity, right, that opportunity to swing for
the fences in eight months without more wring. If you
fail in this first eight months, that all that work
and all that sacrifice of your previous generations is going
(33:06):
to come back, and then you have to, you know,
continue that cycle. We're trying to break these cycles, and
then we're trying to say, hey, there's these disparities that
continue to exist in this country, these costs keep going up.
Why not you try to solve that, you know, in
the similar way that I try to solve it with
mental health. It's really it's not a complicated thing. It's
really at the end of the day, it's something that
(33:27):
when you think about it, right, why haven't these things
been solved? We spend more than every major country, but
we have the worst outcomes. Yeah, okay, great, let's try
something different. Why don't we find people from those communities
that are driving those costs to come in support them
and have them solve these same issues at a scale.
And ultimately my goal is to find somebody who is
way more successful than I was right that we were
(33:49):
able to empower, and that to me is the last
part of the legacy that will allow me to go
retire and go watch my daughter's play soccer on.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Day yeah, yeah, which it's in crowd. I remember talking
to another CEO who's now on the show, and his
company as a market cap of billions and billions of dollars.
He's saying His advice to CEOs was, if you have
an idea and everybody likes it, that's not the right idea.
If you've got an idea that people say, that's crazy,
that's never gonna work, that's what you pursue, and that
(34:17):
sounds like that's kind of at the core of your
origin story and now what you're hoping others embraces. Yeah,
healthcare is complicated and it's messy, but it can be
solved if you solve it or help solve it.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Yeah. Absolutely. I think of there's this thing called the
blue Ocean strategy, right, and are.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
You familiar with I haven't heard that.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
No, So I'm gonna simplify this because there's a lot
of people who study this, but it's basically saying, if
you're out in the ocean and you know there, if
someone puts chum in the water, right, the sharks are
gonna have a feeding frenzy.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
It's really red.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
It's all the chum, right, There's so many people going
after those different pieces, right, it's really complicated because the
biggest shark is just going to come in.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Right.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
You want the blue ocean, you want the place where
that chum is there. You want to swim and go
find that area where it's serene waters.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Right.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
There may be nothing out there yet, but there may
be an opportunity for you to find something that's really
great and different. And that resonating with me when I
was going through my entrepreneurial process was how do I
find some area within these industries. Right at the time,
for me, it was within mental health that no one
had done something and along the lines of what we
had done, and so the same thing is what we're
trying to do within venture capital now. And so the
(35:25):
last part of it, you know, really is Bayless Ventures,
which ultimately is is my own fund, which then invests
up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in early
stage companies right from pre seed to seed rounds, which
is saying, hey, I want to use actual capital and
put my money where my mouth is to say, I
will invest into the company as well and help this company,
you know, get to where they need to go in
(35:46):
the future and hopefully solve some of those health care dispirities.
Only focus on healthcare digital tech or assume me. Digital
health and tech enabled services is my focus, right, that's
my background, and so I'm only investing in those areas.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
You sound like somebody who should write a book. It's
funny say you've written the book.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
Yeah, what's the what's the.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Name is it? Is it a business? Is it biographical?
What is the book?
Speaker 2 (36:11):
It's the mix of both. It's really telling the story.
And I wanted to capture. You know, my family had
the largest black owned healthcare company in the United States,
which took a lot of sacrifice from a lot of
people at a certain point. So I wanted to capture
the history of a family that started from really humble beginnings.
Both my parents came from very humble beginnings, but again
(36:34):
used hard work in education to get us to an
opportunity to actually get to the place that we are today,
both my brother and I, who is equally successful in
his own right. And so the book is a mix
of biography in the beginning that tells the story, and
then the second part of the book is really entrepreneurial,
focused on how I transacted and then steps on entrepreneurs
there's ten steps at the end. By the way, the
(36:54):
book is called the Journey to ten Figures, So the
Journey Venture Studio to ten figures, which is the manage
a company that exists today, and the whole goal is
for me to find another entrepreneur that can exceed I
got a nine figure valuation for the business. I want
to find an entrepreneur in healthcare in the areas that
I'm talking about digital health tech enabled services that can
(37:15):
exceed my valuation. And then they do the same thing
with this generosity cycle and go back and pass the
ladder back down so that we can start to create
this interconnected ecosystem of healthcare entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds that
are solving healthcare disparities and ultimately changing the world.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Yeah, it's an incredible mission, right, I mean we all
benefit if that when it succeeds.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
Every American benefits if this works, right, Like, that's the thing, likes,
this is not focused just on one population. We all
pay for healthcare services in one way or another. It
ends up taking money out of everyone's pocket. We have
to all understand that that in this country, we all
pay for it.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
From pop rocks.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Yeah, to a mission essentially to solve some of our
biggest healthcare challenges with a lot in between. The last question,
been very generous with your time here with us on CEOs.
You should know is justin Bayliss as our guest this week.
It's an impossible to ask, but if you were to
boil down one bit of advice for those listening entrepreneurial
(38:18):
or leadership approach and how you've succeeded, what do you
find to be the most constructive, practical, or helpful advice
that you can offer to that targeted audience.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Can I give you two?
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Absolutely? All right? So the first one.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
Is that you have to listen to the inner voice
that's in your head that is guiding you. You know,
I call it trusting your gut.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
Right.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
A lot of folks have a hard time really doubling
down and trusting your gut. And when you have that
idea or that that momentum that you feel like you
really should be doing something else, you really have to
trust that that voice. And the second thing, which I
speak to this a lot now, is being really comfortable
with delayed gratification. You know, you and I talked about
your u of a roots right. You know, at the
(39:04):
time when I was building a company, my younger brother
was a lottery draft pick, you know, selected number eleven.
He was very, very successful, and I wanted to be
very successful I didn't have a lot of things. I
was putting it all back into the company. I see
a lot of entrepreneurs today that are watching social media
right and think that, oh, I've been doing this for
(39:25):
a year, so I can go off and splurge and
do X, Y and Z. You have to understand that
delayed gratification is ultimately makes things so much sweeter. So
for me to see how he was living and going
through all of that and then be able to double
down on my own process and say, Okay, I have
to believe in this and understand that it's going to
take a long time for this to manifest was really
(39:48):
important for me, and I think a lot of folks
want it today. They don't understand the sacrifice that is necessary,
the years of sacrifice, the stress, the pain which is
all this is highlighted in the book. I've been sick
multiple times from stress. It takes a toll on you,
and you cannot think that you're just going to get
rich quick like that those days are done. Social media
is a disservice. You should really understand what it takes.
(40:10):
A delayed gratification that also means giving up social events,
That means understanding you're not going to have the ongoing
vacation and be able to do all the things that
your other friends are going to do if you're an entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurs have to understand delay gratification.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
Unbelievable advice, because not only social media can be a problem.
Social media is contributed or mental health crisis as well.
So just generally speaking, let's just just everybody agreed to
get rid of social media.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
That's I don't want to say that and then have
meta and we may want medicine to give a donation
to I'll fit your studio.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
It's an unbelievable bit of advice. And first of all,
thank you for your time. We appreciate everything you've done
to make the communities in Phoenix and the state of
Arizona a better place for everybody to live. And I
can't wait to follow this journey and continued success and uh,
just appreciate everything you've done.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Hey, thank you, Jody, thanks for the opportunity. And bear
it down.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
That's right, Bear down, that's justin Bayless from Bayless Ventures
and the Journey Venture Studios. And this has been another
edition of CEOs. You should know Phoenix
Welcome to another edition of CEOs You Should Know Phoenix.
I'm your host, joe Yaylor. Very pleased this time to
be joined by the managing principle for Bayless Ventures. He's
also the founder and president of Journey Venture Studios. Justin
Bayliss joins us here and CEOs you Should Know.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Welcome, Justin ay Man, Jody, happy to be here. Thanks
for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Oh Man, we got a lot to talk about. You
have a really impressive background with a lot of success
in a lot of different areas, and a lot of
that started in healthcare. But for you, your journey, you
started with an interest in finance, and then there comes
healthcare and mental health and then entrepreneurialship. So let's start here.
How did you figure out you wanted to be a
(00:39):
kind of a mover and a shaker, a CEO and
somebody who's building and launching as your career path.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Yeah, I mean, I think most entrepreneurs would say that
they kind of knew at an early age that they
thought a little bit different. So for me, both my
parents instilled hard work and education at an early age,
but I caught myself always throughout my matriculation and education
doing some type of entrepreneurial journey. So I got suspended
(01:09):
from middle school for selling candy out of my locker.
You know, they actually thought I was selling drugs, I think, but.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
What kind of candy?
Speaker 2 (01:16):
So I would have my mom take me pop rocks? Okay,
my mom would take me. I would figure out ways
to work at my father's office. Okay, so this hard
work process in his mental health clinic and would earn
a dollar an hour, and I would take that dollar
and then go to Costco at the time and buy
in bulk. And then I would realize, like at school,
(01:36):
there was no candy available, So I'm like, huh. I
realized that at the closest circle K to the school,
we would all try to go after school and get
some type of candy. And then I saw the prices
at Costco and quickly realized that I can make a
little bit of a profit by buying in bulk, taking
it to school, and then selling it because at the
time there was a no candy policy. So I decided
(01:58):
to go ahead and take that entrepreneurial journey. And yeah,
I definitely got suspended for a couple of weeks for that.
My parents actually, I really appreciated my parents because they
told me I did break the rule, but they appreciated
my prowess and all this. My mom started asking a
lot of questions about rotting my teeth when I was
bringing home this candy, but ultimately, you know, they were
able to support that. And so my mom actually then
(02:20):
put me in summer school and personal finance and helped
me start to learn what, you know, managing stocks in
a portfolio would be at eleven. So I had parents
who really kind of saw my I think aptitude towards
certain things, and ultimately that led me to want to
become a finance professional and started my first career at
(02:41):
Morgan Stanley on Wall Street and investment banking division. And
my father started to get a little bit older and
started to call me about this mental health industry and
how unsophisticated it was and how I was lacking so
much information to the public about how it could change
people's way of life, and him being a mental health
professional his whole career, he really was like, there's so
(03:02):
much opportunity to bring some business acumen into the space
and try to figure out things differently. And so around
six oh seven he had like this Motorola flip phone,
and as we were kind of talking before the show,
I was driving back with him from Tucson to Phoenix
and he looks at me and says, one day, on
this Motorola phone, people are going to be able to
(03:23):
see each other and do this virtual business. And I said,
I think you're out of your mind if you think
I'm leaving Wall Street to come back to you know,
our mom and pop five employee, you know, mental health
office in Phoenix. And he looks at me and to
his credit, says, you know, you call yourself this big
Wall Street businessman, and you know what other business in
(03:44):
the world, the bigger it gets, the more people you help,
and your names on the sign as a source of pride.
So what kind of businessman would you be to not
pay attention to this and come back and take a
shot at building the family business. And that's how I
actually got the bug. And I said, you know what,
I can always go back to the world of finance.
I performed in my college studies. I did very, very well.
(04:06):
You know, Morgan Stanley has hired me. You know I
can always go back to this, So why not take
a chance now when I'm young at twenty one years
old and take a shot at this and see if
I can help my father and help my family and
help other people. And so I left March of eight.
I resigned from Morgan Stanley at this timing right, and
came back to Phoenix and the rest is history.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
It's a pretty unique origin story, right, because I feel
like a lot of the CEO or entrepreneur stories, particularly
once I hear on this show and elsewhere, it's a
it's for whatever, it's a passion that they're immediately consumed
with that they start and they found this was a
powerful personal kind of plea from your dad that was like,
you can do something here. And how did you Were
(04:50):
you conflicted in that at all? Were you, hey, I
kind of want to do my own thing or did
you kind of recognize in real time what it meant
to your dad and your family?
Speaker 3 (04:58):
And that was like an immediate light bulb.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
So legacy has always been important to me, understanding history,
and I think that that was important. But I grew
up in this clinic. So at nine years old, you know,
my parents put me in a shirt and tie and said,
if you want to play basketball, you need to go work.
And so I every summer after high school, I would
walk back to the clinic. So I knew every administrative
(05:21):
job by the time I graduated high school. I knew
how to do the billing. I knew how to run
the front desk. I knew how to score MMPI, which
is a certain assessment that psychologists use. I knew how
to do everything in that office. So when he put
that opportunity in front of me, I said, you know,
there's few things in this world that I know better
than spending all of those countless hours than in that building.
(05:42):
And now I've learned this world of finance. I raised money,
helped raise money for companies. I really had learned a
new skill set. I said, what if I could bring,
you know, this administrative sophistication and background and accounting and
finance to a world that quite frankly hadn't had that.
And then I started thinking about, Okay, technology is changing.
Is there a way that I could bring a new
(06:02):
technology into this practice that could totally disrupt it? Why not?
And his whole thing around, you know, producing value that
helps someone else right at the same time, can help
your family, spoke to me. Especially working on Wall Street,
where you're buying and selling off of others that really
just spoke to me. And so, you know, I don't
think I ever had the inherent bug to do the
(06:24):
family business, but I knew that those things all spoke
to my values at the time, and that's something that
was very interesting to me, and I took the risk.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
I'm curious when you went through this with your dad.
I'm sure and I can tell immediately that you have,
you know, profound respect for your family and that means
the world to you. But did did you look at
your dad differently after that conversation? You know, if my
dad was telling me like, hey, we're going to be
on the phone. It's a motorol, a razor flip phone
or whatever like that. Okay, all right, all right, crazy
(06:54):
old man, like whatever, do you when you've gone through
this and you've built your career and you've seen where
it's led, did it change how you viewed your your dad,
your own dad?
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (07:06):
And I mean in most entrepreneurial businesses, you have something
that's called the visionary and the integrator, right, and you
have somebody who understands kind of big picture the space
and has you know, grandiose ideas. My father was a
savant in terms of providing mental health services. He was
one of the first to actually create a program that
sent people out to individuals and patients' homes. Right now
(07:27):
we think about house calls as being nothing well for
mental health. He was really revolutionary in that. So he
knew his craft. What he didn't know, because he never
had any business training, was how to operationalize all of
the things that he had.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
In his head.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
And so I think the combination of me understanding the
nuances of the business, him being a clinician, and we
had that unique ability back and forth between one another,
and that transition from father and son to father son
and partners was a real step that we had to take.
And I tell a lot of entrepreneurs and family business
one of the hard what's things to do when you
(08:01):
have a generational change or generational difference between the partners,
whether it's father son, mother son, mother daughter is the
younger partner has to immediately put wins on the board
to gain the respect of the older partner or the
generational leader who started the business, or you're going to
always be in a constant chaos and conflict. So I
(08:27):
knew with him that this was his baby. I was
not a PhD clinician, right that I had to respect
his craft and his needs, but put wins on the
board so that he would listen to the things that
I wanted to change and transform. And it's not rocket
science here, but a lot of people just think that, well,
I can come in and do this with my parents,
or my family, or my brother or whoever it might be.
(08:47):
And I think that's a recipe for disaster. You have
to first create that commonality understanding, put the time in,
and put wins on the board, and then you can
start to transform.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Back around us in sports hosting a sports row, and
I know you and your family have a tremendous connection
to the world of sports. That's what it sounds like.
When you're a first round draft pick or a rookie
and you're coming to a veteran team, you have to
earn Lebron's trust. Whether it's Browny Junior or it's Austin Reeves,
you have to earn the trust of the older, accomplished
(09:20):
veteran And that sounds like how you had to approach this.
So it's an incredible story right there. But let's pick
it up from after you come and you join the
family business and mental health. What were you able to
succeed in doing? What were what kind of work did
it take and what were the results? Yeah, so so
real quick. And by the way, we can talk about
this later. There's a lot of parallels between entrepreneurship and sports, right,
(09:43):
and we will get into that in what we're building now,
taking a lot of parallels out of those worlds. But
the first thing in the Family Business, it was just
a children's medicaid clinic, so focused on you know, children
eighteen and unders that were low income and providing services
to them and their families. What I quickly REALI from
working you know with Morgan Stanley, we're doing a lot
of consumer segmentation towards baby boomers at the time, right,
(10:05):
baby boomers were going to be the largest population.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
You know, how how is the world preparing to take
care of these baby boomers? So the first thing I
wanted to do was figure out how do we put
a service together that levers our same competency for kids
that we could do for geriatrics and older adults. And
first to do that, we have to have an administrative
infrastructure that allows us to understand our cost our units,
I mean, all the things to understand how the business functions,
(10:29):
which at the time loved my father may rest in peace.
He only had a Quicken account with income and expense
in green and red. That was our administrative system, okay,
and he had a payroll company which was paychecks at
the time that he paid payroll. So I first had
to go back and do a full audit of the
business and understand over you know, thirty years of practice,
(10:49):
what were the unit measurements in the business, understanding how
it functioned, and really put together you know, financial statements
for the company. From there, I understood the union economics,
and then I could go out and build these new
business units. And so what we did is we.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Partnered with.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Managed care organizations in the Phoenix area and found that
there was this real gap in the market where people
were not providing comprehensive mental health services and skilled nursing
facilities and assisted living facilities. And I quickly realized, like
this is a growth area. We needed to find some
clinicians who had that training, which my father and I
partnered together to find and we went out hired him.
(11:26):
We went from five employees to about forty five employees.
In eighteen months, Wow grew a whole new business line
that was putting the wins on the board right and
it was profitable. Unfortunately, after that eighteen months, my father
in the middle of the night had an unforeseen heart attack,
oh Man, and he had to retire.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Overnight.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
They had actually revived whom he actually was pronounced dead.
They revived and brought him back. Took him quite a
while to even get back on his feet. So at
twenty four years old, I was handed the keys to
this car that most of the staff were still hired
to him as CEO.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
So no, you're in charge at that point, you are
effectively running the entire organization.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
Jody.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Literally overnight, we were trying to make sure he could revive,
to sign the papers to transform us from a professional
corporation to inc. So that I could actually run the
company because I was not a clinician, So we literally
had to you know, transform the actual legal entity and
make sure he could sign off on that where the
company wouldn't even be here, we wouldn't be having this
conversation he was able to come to, we signed the papers,
(12:24):
I took over, and immediately behind when I took over,
I started to find that one of the biggest benefits
from our service delivery with old adults was that we
were lowering the overall total cost of care for these
really chronically elderly patients. Okay, so when we brought in
mental health services to a patient who had a co
(12:45):
occurring issue let's call it diabetes, and they were depressed
and they're in these facilities, the medical cost offset to
the payers to the nursing home to that individual were
a two percent.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
And that started to spur this idea my mind in
twenty ten, like, why do we have these bifurcated systems
in this country that say, if you're a medical patient,
you need to go through this store, If you're a
behavioral health patient or mental health patient, you need to
go through this store. And you have these payers and
it was just totally separate and distinct, and they didn't
talk to each other. Yet the mind and body is one, right,
the clinicians want to work together and figure out solutions.
(13:21):
A PCP, a primary care provider, wants to understand what's
going on with this person's mental health to be able
to control their medical and vice versa.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
So well, my dad's rehabbing.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
I decided to change the whole company.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Do you run it by them?
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Is yeah, So I run it byom and I say,
you know, this is the you challenge me to come
back from Wall Street and said you wanted me to
use my tools. This is the vision that I have.
I called it integrated care, which now people start to use.
And you know I.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Should have trademarked that phrase.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
By the way, Well we're a little late for that now.
But yes, and I think there's a way we can
do this under our umbrella and do it for all popular,
not just kids, not just older adults, but every person.
And this will make mental health accessible because there's so
many barriers, whether it's stigma, whether it's cost, whether it's transportation.
If we combine these services and someone walks into one
(14:13):
building and they know that their total health can be
controlled and monitored and managed by someone they trust, it'll
be a game changer.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Cuss me out. Oh really not happy. Cuss me out.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Said, you know, you know you are coming into a
world that this has been tried before. You don't understand.
I mean, you gotta understand. He was literally on his deathbed,
he sees his young son who's in the middle of
his twenty saying, hey, you're going to take his baby
and totally change it. He was very frustrated.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
And pissed off.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
So I had to come back to him and challenge him,
and I said, you know, you called yourself a clinician,
a healer for all these years you challenged me to
come back from Wall Street. It is the who of
you to now allow me this opportunity as you challenged
me to come back before. What kind of clinician would
you be if you didn't allow me to do this?
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Well played, that's a nice chess move on the chess board.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
So he cussed me out again, called me back and said,
put a business plan together and let's talk about it.
And so in twenty eleven, I put this business plan together.
He said, how are we going to pay for all this,
because you know we're a small, small company. I said,
we're going to have to take out a loan, which
means both his house and my house we'd have to
put up as collateral. And now, mind you, he can't
(15:26):
work anymore, so if this goes bad and we go bankrupt,
he's in real peril.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
He was unable to return to work. I was not
unable to return to work.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
He was disabled at them, and to his credit, we
went to JP Morgan Chase and we did a three
million dollar SBA loan and put everything we had on
the line for this concept. We almost went bankrupt about
three times. He was ready to kill me a lot.
But towards twenty fourteen we started to see it work.
(15:54):
So it was a three years of this just working
through it.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
What is Let's dive into that for just a second,
because I think this is where so much of the
story for a lot of would be entrepreneurs or in
the process of it, that three years of struggle.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
What does that look like? What does that feel like?
What is what is that experience like?
Speaker 2 (16:12):
Yeah, So, first and foremost it was creating the strategy
for implementing this. So how are we going to create
new facilities like infrastructure that we're going to change the
actual operational workflows for a patient to walk into a building,
which now seems like rudimentary, Like you're like not even
thinking about this. Back back then, though, mental health facilities
you ever visited them felt like prisons. They were not
(16:34):
they were not well built, they were not nice.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
We said, one flew over the cuckoosness was the entire
country's idea of mental health.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
It's been very behind for a long time. So we
first had to create what was our brand, what was
our image? What were we going to have workflow? So
it felt like something different for the patient. And then,
by the way, we were a mental health company for
a long time, we didn't understand what primary care needed.
So we had to find primary care partners who, quite frankly,
were like, I don't want to necessarily deal with patients
who have this all day. It makes my work harder.
So we had to convince them that working side by
(17:02):
side with a psychiatrist or a licensed professional counselor would
be a better part for their practice, and that's a
hard thing to sell when you're not a clinician. Then
we had to figure out, okay, how do we get
paid for this right? How do you get payers who
have historically been bifurcated to say, yes, we are going
to pay for more utilization of care, which managed care
(17:22):
means they want to manage the care and don't want
to necessarily overutilize. So it was years of working through
different components, of trying different things. We ultimately use some
of the loan funding to acquire a pediatric clinic, which
brought in eight thousand kids into our umbrella, and that
really gave us a large enough sample to show the
value set of this kind of pilot, so to speak,
(17:46):
and that went live July one of twenty thirteen. At
the time, the pediatric clinic had around five thousand Medicaid
children that were in their practice, and when we did
an overlap of the behavioral health utilization, there's only two
hundred of those five thousand MEDICAI kids whould receive behavioral
health services.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Literature says forty percent of Medicaid children have underlying behavioral
health issues. Within four months, we had twelve hundred kids
who came on to our roles. That was like our
proof point, right, So by the end of twenty thirteen,
we're like, okay, there's definitely the need here. We figured
out a way with the workflows, we're figuring out the facilities.
Now we need to figure out how to get paid.
(18:24):
And we started to transition into more adult services. So
before the opioid epidemic became big, we said, you know what,
what about adults who have these issues and they're using
because they just don't know an escape. What if we
created the same program for adults. So we did that,
and then that started to grow, and so by the
time we get to the end of twenty fourteen, we
(18:45):
now have a pilot set of young children, right teenagers,
these adults who have these really co occurring substance use disorders,
and older adults that are chronically ill. Right in today's
world in healthcare, when you say you're having these populations,
it's like a researchers the State of Arizona started to
take note of what we were doing at the time,
and the Medicaid director started to ask us questions about
(19:06):
what we were building, and we went and presented to
them some of our data and research and what we
had put together, and by the end of twenty fourteen,
they announced that they were going to start to transition
the State of Arizona's Medicaid plan to start to look
at how these systems become integrated. So by we get
to spring of fifteen, we're now saying, okay, which I
left out portion of this. We started testing telemedicine in
(19:28):
twenty ten. We kept building technology enablement through all of this.
Spring of twenty fifteen started to work. Finally we started
to turn a profit. My father comes into me and says,
you finally figured out this integration mess. And he pulls
out this phone again, brings it up and says, I
told you about this phone.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
It's time. Remember that moment. Oh.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
He's like, I told you about this phone, and now
the iPhone is out there. He's like, you need to
get this on this phone. And I said done and
said I'm on it. So I start to really put
some emphasis into mobal Health is what we called it
at the time. And I'm driving to a meeting in Gilbert,
this company here and locally called evisit at the time,
to go meet with them to look at their delivery system.
(20:10):
And I get a call from my mom. My father
had a second heart attack and he died that day.
So he saw us where maybe eighty employees, seventy five
eighty employees. This is June of twenty fifteen. And after
he passed away and we got through all the kind
of minutia of grief and all the stuff that comes
along with losing the leader of the company. To me,
(20:34):
that was like the energy that really pushed me to say, okay,
we figured out integration. But now let's figure out this
technology solution. So over the next three years we continue
to build out more facilities. So by the time we
get to COVID, we now have nine facilities through the
Phoenix area. We've got also where the first UAKA credited
telehealth company in Arizona, where the first ten in the nation,
along with teledoc American, well all these other companies now
(20:56):
that you see online Betterhelp that are telemedicine providers. But
we were just very well prepared and had had mastered
kind of this art of having facilities and technology enablement
for people when they need to come into facility, we're
there for you. If you want to do a virtual visit,
we're there for you. We figured out how to make
it safe, effective, reliable COVID hits. You know, the rest
(21:18):
is kind of history. At first, I was kind of distraught,
like We've put all of this into this thing and
now all of a sudden, we're shutting down facilities. And
it just clicked like this was the adoption moment that
he wanted. This the adoption moment that I had been
building for. And we quickly had a management meeting ordered
as many laptops we could get our hands on, and
decided to go all in, and you know, we marketed
(21:39):
here on iHeartMedia and everywhere else saying hey, we're available
for you, you know, Arizona market during this tough time.
And after about a few weeks that adoption just really
kicked in and we started to grow dramatically. And that's
when I knew we needed to find a partner to
really take our business to the next level. So I
called Morgan Stanley back, and I called my former boss
(22:00):
and said, I've been waiting to make this call for
quite a few years. And her name's Carla Harris. She's
an award winning singer. She was a vice chairman of
Morgan Stanley. I mean, she's legendary in Wall Street. And
I said, you know, I would be curious if you
guys be willing to look at what I've put together
because I need a strategic partner to take us to
the next level. I think I've maximized what I can do.
(22:21):
And she said, Okay, I'm gonna put you in front
of an investment banking division and see if they want
to take you on as a client. Presented an investment
making division, they took us on as a client during COVID.
Mind you, I also have three kids under two in
this time period, and we basically do a road show
and present to all the major private equity strategic partners
across the country. And by December of twenty twenty, we
(22:45):
had inked a strategic partnership with a Fortune five hundred
called Magellan Health, who at the time was the largest
publicly traded in mental health company, and decided to go
that route in the future. Three weeks later, we found
out Magellan was getting acquired by another company called Senteen Corporation,
and that changed my plans a little bit, and ultimately
I had to leave the company in January of twenty
(23:07):
twenty two. And we can talk about now kind of
the future direction.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
Of what we're going to do. Right.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
I'm sorry for the loss and your dad, and that
sounds like an incredible just powerfully positive force in your
life then now and for your kids and the entire
generation of the Bayliss family. An unbelievable kind of circular
story there, right, And now, as you mentioned there, all
those lessons, all of those successes, all of those challenges
(23:37):
in new ventures. Yeah, and what you know, Bayless Ventures,
what is the mission, What is the goal? What is
the kind of driving force behind some of your new
including Journey Venture students, which we'll talk about here in
a few minutes as well.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
So I think, first, for anybody listening to this, I mean,
if you're paying attention, the US still lags all of
our peers in terms of healthcare delivering the world on
every indicator. Even in Arizona, where we sit today, we
have significant health care disparities for certain populations that still
are not solved. I learned a really valuable experience when
I sold the company and transitioned out, and I tell
(24:15):
it quite often, is that those usually who are making
a lot of strategic, large decisions are so far away
from the actual problems that it's hard for them to
create the solution. And I think our health care solution,
or excuse me, our healthcare system has done a disservice
by having all of these layers of functionality and bureaucracy
where eventually the problem goes so far away from those
(24:37):
who are making the decisions it's impossible for them to
truly understand it. So first and foremost, I believe that
those that are closest to the problem are the best
ones suited to solve the problem. I told you about
my story, right, growing up in the clinic, I knew
how to speak the language of mental health. I knew
all the acronyms of mental health.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
My parents at the dinner table as kids, used to
talk about our own mental health. So for me was
a natural progression that I understood the true essence of
the business, so I could innovate within the business without
having to take years and years and years of understanding
the underlying business itself. So I think that's first and foremost.
I think second, if you look at the healthcare industry,
(25:14):
we are still the third largest contributor to GDP in
the United States.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
Right.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
It is a humongous industry. It's not very sexy for
a lot of young entrepreneurs, which is part of the problem.
Like who grows up and says I want to one
day be a healthcare administrator of a clinic.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
I've never met anybody.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Very few people have that intrinsic. So what happens, which
is this is not a slight to anybody out there,
This is just fact. Right. A lot of folks who
are in the clinical realm go through the clinical path
and then transition into the operation or business path and
a lot of the time that's a different right brain
left brain way of thinking. And again I told you
(25:51):
about the unique ability of my father and I partnering together, right,
and having that unique ability ourselves where we're both talented
in different areas. So I think that's second, there's a
huge opportunity. It's only costs are only increasing, like we're
seeing that more and more, so we have to find
a solution. I think the third thing, if you really
look at then we're going to more of the underrepresented, right,
(26:13):
communities that are disadvantaged. Capital does not flow to those
communities in the way it flows to other communities. So
less than two percent of all venture capital dollars or
risk capital is what it's called, right, No collateral right
goes to underrepresented founders. Right, So less than two percent
women in this country are fifty percent women get less
(26:34):
than one percent. Okay, So we have intrinsically an issue
where capital is not flowing for the innovation to certain sectors.
Speaker 3 (26:42):
Right.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
And I can get into this whole philosophical conversation about
we all have to pay for health care in one
way or another. It's going to end up in correction,
it is going to end up public well, it ends
up in places.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
So if you take those three things I just mentioned
understanding my background, I was successful. I had to exit,
you know, I had resource. Was from this exit, I
quickly started to do more research again about some of
these problems and said, how can I best use my experience,
my resources to try to solve these problems going forward?
(27:11):
And the first thing I did was called back Carla
Harris at Morganstein and I said, I have an idea
about how I can get involved in venture capital, and
she said, get on a plane in New York right away.
So I go out and meet with her, and she's
talking to me about she started this fund at Morgan
Stanley called the Next Level Fund, and then the Next
Level Fund is a technology focused fund that works with
(27:33):
underrepresented founders backed by Microsoft, walmart Hurst Media, Morgan Stanley,
and they didn't have a healthcare champion to help them
with the fund, and she asked if I'd be interested
in getting involved. I could learn I could be involved
with operational due diligence with the founders, and I said, absolutely,
this is right up my alley. So starting to work
with them. I started to say, well, what else can
we put together in Arizona that can try to solve
(27:55):
some of this as well? Because as I made the
rounds in the Arizona VC community, it looked very home
a genius and I said, that's not representative Arizona, that's
not representive my hometown. How can I bring some opportunity
to those who want to try to disrupt healthcare as well?
And so I pulled together a group of people in
the space and had a sum in Flagstaff, Arizona in
(28:15):
July twenty twenty two, locked everyone in the room for
the weekend and said, what can we do together a
lot of really smart people, what can we create? And
so out of that we created really two pathways. One
is one company that I still lead to this day,
is called ten Figures. Ten Figures is an asset management
and advisory firm, and an advisory component is really helping
consult early stage healthcare ventures and those founders on how
(28:39):
to move through this process, that life cycle I told
you about again. I took SBA loan. A lot of
founders don't have the ability to do that, especially in
the market environment we're in today. Interest rates now are
coming down, but interest rates are still significantly higher than
they were when I was growing the business. So that's
not an option for them to go and get collateral
and be able to to finance their actual business. So
(29:03):
they need VC dollars. So how do I help them
create an environment that can prepare them to take on
VC dollars. It's one entity. Second entity, which is really
my family's foundation and giving is in legacy plays called
the Journey Venture Studio, and the Journey Venture Studio really
gives underrepresented founders who are talented, like extremely talented, an
(29:25):
opportunity to build a startup that they had a lived
experience in healthcare specifically, whether it is mental health, women's health,
aging and elder care, chronic disease management, sports medicine, or
even packaging and supply chain for healthcare. They have to
have a lived experience, they have to be talented. We
will give them the footing to come to Arizona and
build the business from scratch.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
So this is your casting and net across the country.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
It's a national search. This is now our second cohort
actually just started last month, and you know they actually
have to come here and it's kind of like I
try to tell people to explain it, think a real
world meets Shark Tank. Okay, we move them here, we
put them up in an apartment, we help with their
(30:10):
basic living needs, but we build the businesses with them,
so they have to have that lived experience and say, hey,
I noticed that in my family we really struggled with
chronic elder care for my grandparents. And I see this
really being an issue going forward in the future. I've
graduated from Wharton MBA. I have all this student dead.
(30:32):
I want to take this chance to actually go and
solve it, but I have all this debt and this
consulting job is going to pay me. How am I
going to be able to do that when I'm the
first one in my family to really graduate. That's the
type of founder we're looking for, right, And to bring
them in and say, hey, you've had this lived experience,
you're talented, you've done everything right. Let us help you
with that footing, and let us help you go and
solve this issue. Because you were closest to the problem,
(30:54):
we believe you understand the problem better. We can help
you with all the venture building, we can help you
with the playbook, we can give resources and networking, and
we can introduce you to capital, but it's up to
you to really come in and put that work together.
We're just giving you that family and friends around that
you don't have.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Has that been I immediately think because in radio we're
always talking about targeted audiences, and some audiences are easier
to reach than others. Is that an targeted audience that
is difficult to reach? Is the message? As you mentioned,
healthcare is not the sexiest industry, but it's one that's
arguably the most need for almost the most benefit across
(31:32):
the country. How do you attract those people that you're targeting? Yeah,
I think we've been I think getting the word out. Initially,
people are like, what is this right?
Speaker 2 (31:42):
Like, what do you mean? Like you're going to create
this venture studio that ultimately is putting all of these
programs and services and kind of the support systems. Mazov hierarchy,
which is another part of my mental health upbringing, understanding
how important that is for people, Right, what are you doing?
What are you talking about here? It resonates with me
because when I first said I was going to put
a mental health and a primary care physician in the
(32:03):
same office, people also say what are you doing here?
You want to put technology? What are you doing here?
The founders are now starting to understand how amazing of
an opportunity this really is. Right, It's very rare you
find a studio that gives the full breadth of venture building,
which there's a lot of venture studios in the country, right.
(32:25):
Venture studios are not a new concept. The difference though,
is that venture studios historically are a fund that has
been raised to find founders to go out and build
these businesses together. Right, But the founder ultimately gets like
a minority portion of the equity and the fund gets
the majority of the equity. We're a nonprofit five oh
one C three that's doing this to say, hey, we're
(32:45):
giving you the opportunity. We'll be your partner in this,
but we're not an investor. Right, You're keeping the majority
of the equity. This is your thing. We're really just
giving you the opportunity, right, that opportunity to swing for
the fences in eight months without more wring. If you
fail in this first eight months, that all that work
and all that sacrifice of your previous generations is going
(33:06):
to come back, and then you have to, you know,
continue that cycle. We're trying to break these cycles, and
then we're trying to say, hey, there's these disparities that
continue to exist in this country, these costs keep going up.
Why not you try to solve that, you know, in
the similar way that I try to solve it with
mental health. It's really it's not a complicated thing. It's
really at the end of the day, it's something that
(33:27):
when you think about it, right, why haven't these things
been solved? We spend more than every major country, but
we have the worst outcomes. Yeah, okay, great, let's try
something different. Why don't we find people from those communities
that are driving those costs to come in support them
and have them solve these same issues at a scale.
And ultimately my goal is to find somebody who is
way more successful than I was right that we were
(33:49):
able to empower, and that to me is the last
part of the legacy that will allow me to go
retire and go watch my daughter's play soccer on.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Day yeah, yeah, which it's in crowd. I remember talking
to another CEO who's now on the show, and his
company as a market cap of billions and billions of dollars.
He's saying His advice to CEOs was, if you have
an idea and everybody likes it, that's not the right idea.
If you've got an idea that people say, that's crazy,
that's never gonna work, that's what you pursue, and that
(34:17):
sounds like that's kind of at the core of your
origin story and now what you're hoping others embraces. Yeah,
healthcare is complicated and it's messy, but it can be
solved if you solve it or help solve it.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Yeah. Absolutely. I think of there's this thing called the
blue Ocean strategy, right, and are.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
You familiar with I haven't heard that.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
No, So I'm gonna simplify this because there's a lot
of people who study this, but it's basically saying, if
you're out in the ocean and you know there, if
someone puts chum in the water, right, the sharks are
gonna have a feeding frenzy.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
It's really red.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
It's all the chum, right, There's so many people going
after those different pieces, right, it's really complicated because the
biggest shark is just going to come in.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Right.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
You want the blue ocean, you want the place where
that chum is there. You want to swim and go
find that area where it's serene waters.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Right.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
There may be nothing out there yet, but there may
be an opportunity for you to find something that's really
great and different. And that resonating with me when I
was going through my entrepreneurial process was how do I
find some area within these industries. Right at the time,
for me, it was within mental health that no one
had done something and along the lines of what we
had done, and so the same thing is what we're
trying to do within venture capital now. And so the
(35:25):
last part of it, you know, really is Bayless Ventures,
which ultimately is is my own fund, which then invests
up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in early
stage companies right from pre seed to seed rounds, which
is saying, hey, I want to use actual capital and
put my money where my mouth is to say, I
will invest into the company as well and help this company,
you know, get to where they need to go in
(35:46):
the future and hopefully solve some of those health care dispirities.
Only focus on healthcare digital tech or assume me. Digital
health and tech enabled services is my focus, right, that's
my background, and so I'm only investing in those areas.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
You sound like somebody who should write a book. It's
funny say you've written the book.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
Yeah, what's the what's the.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
Name is it? Is it a business? Is it biographical?
What is the book?
Speaker 2 (36:11):
It's the mix of both. It's really telling the story.
And I wanted to capture. You know, my family had
the largest black owned healthcare company in the United States,
which took a lot of sacrifice from a lot of
people at a certain point. So I wanted to capture
the history of a family that started from really humble beginnings.
Both my parents came from very humble beginnings, but again
(36:34):
used hard work in education to get us to an
opportunity to actually get to the place that we are today,
both my brother and I, who is equally successful in
his own right. And so the book is a mix
of biography in the beginning that tells the story, and
then the second part of the book is really entrepreneurial,
focused on how I transacted and then steps on entrepreneurs
there's ten steps at the end. By the way, the
(36:54):
book is called the Journey to ten Figures, So the
Journey Venture Studio to ten figures, which is the manage
a company that exists today, and the whole goal is
for me to find another entrepreneur that can exceed I
got a nine figure valuation for the business. I want
to find an entrepreneur in healthcare in the areas that
I'm talking about digital health tech enabled services that can
(37:15):
exceed my valuation. And then they do the same thing
with this generosity cycle and go back and pass the
ladder back down so that we can start to create
this interconnected ecosystem of healthcare entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds that
are solving healthcare disparities and ultimately changing the world.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Yeah, it's an incredible mission, right, I mean we all
benefit if that when it succeeds.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
Every American benefits if this works, right, Like, that's the thing, likes,
this is not focused just on one population. We all
pay for healthcare services in one way or another. It
ends up taking money out of everyone's pocket. We have
to all understand that that in this country, we all
pay for it.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
From pop rocks.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Yeah, to a mission essentially to solve some of our
biggest healthcare challenges with a lot in between. The last question,
been very generous with your time here with us on CEOs.
You should know is justin Bayliss as our guest this week.
It's an impossible to ask, but if you were to
boil down one bit of advice for those listening entrepreneurial
(38:18):
or leadership approach and how you've succeeded, what do you
find to be the most constructive, practical, or helpful advice
that you can offer to that targeted audience.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Can I give you two?
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Absolutely? All right? So the first one.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
Is that you have to listen to the inner voice
that's in your head that is guiding you. You know,
I call it trusting your gut.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
Right.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
A lot of folks have a hard time really doubling
down and trusting your gut. And when you have that
idea or that that momentum that you feel like you
really should be doing something else, you really have to
trust that that voice. And the second thing, which I
speak to this a lot now, is being really comfortable
with delayed gratification. You know, you and I talked about
your u of a roots right. You know, at the
(39:04):
time when I was building a company, my younger brother
was a lottery draft pick, you know, selected number eleven.
He was very, very successful, and I wanted to be
very successful I didn't have a lot of things. I
was putting it all back into the company. I see
a lot of entrepreneurs today that are watching social media
right and think that, oh, I've been doing this for
(39:25):
a year, so I can go off and splurge and
do X, Y and Z. You have to understand that
delayed gratification is ultimately makes things so much sweeter. So
for me to see how he was living and going
through all of that and then be able to double
down on my own process and say, Okay, I have
to believe in this and understand that it's going to
take a long time for this to manifest was really
(39:48):
important for me, and I think a lot of folks
want it today. They don't understand the sacrifice that is necessary,
the years of sacrifice, the stress, the pain which is
all this is highlighted in the book. I've been sick
multiple times from stress. It takes a toll on you,
and you cannot think that you're just going to get
rich quick like that those days are done. Social media
is a disservice. You should really understand what it takes.
(40:10):
A delayed gratification that also means giving up social events,
That means understanding you're not going to have the ongoing
vacation and be able to do all the things that
your other friends are going to do if you're an entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurs have to understand delay gratification.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
Unbelievable advice, because not only social media can be a problem.
Social media is contributed or mental health crisis as well.
So just generally speaking, let's just just everybody agreed to
get rid of social media.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
That's I don't want to say that and then have
meta and we may want medicine to give a donation
to I'll fit your studio.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
It's an unbelievable bit of advice. And first of all,
thank you for your time. We appreciate everything you've done
to make the communities in Phoenix and the state of
Arizona a better place for everybody to live. And I
can't wait to follow this journey and continued success and uh,
just appreciate everything you've done.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Hey, thank you, Jody, thanks for the opportunity. And bear
it down.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
That's right, Bear down, that's justin Bayless from Bayless Ventures
and the Journey Venture Studios. And this has been another
edition of CEOs. You should know Phoenix
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