Renee DeSilva 0:06

Welcome back to The Academy Table. I’m Renee DeSilva, CEO of The Academy and your host and I’m happy to have you back with us again today. In each episode of The Table, I’ll bring you real conversations with healthcare’s best leaders and thinkers. We want to broaden who is at the table while covering the issues that are critical for driving our industry forward. In today’s conversation, I welcome my friend and colleague Brian Regan to The Table. Brian is a general partner and head of healthcare at Welsh, Carson, Anderson, and Stowe. Welsh Carson is a private equity firm with more than 40 years of investing in a series of influential healthcare and technology companies. I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Brian across the last two and a half years as part of the Welsh Carson strategic partnership with The Academy. He has such a unique view and incisive sense of where the industry is going. In our conversation today, we cover a lot of ground. We start by talking about the evolving private equity landscape including Welch Carson’s process for evaluating potential investments or de novo opportunities as well as the hallmarks of the most successful partnerships. Midway through we make a little bit of a transition into a broader discussion on leadership. One of the things that’s unique about Brian is his board service. He sits on seven companies, including The Academy, and has unique access and insight into what makes an effective CEO and leadership team at scale. We cover the role of leaders in cultivating diverse talent where Brian articulates both the moral imperative and the business case for doing so. With that, let’s head to the table.

Brian, welcome to The Academy Table. So happy to have you this afternoon.

Brian Regan 1:54
Great to be here.

Renee DeSilva 1:56
Brian, let me start by throwing a few figures at you. In 1979, the year Welsh Carson closed its first fund, total PE deal value was about $250 million. If we were to fast forward to 2019, that volume hit $80 billion in healthcare alone. How would you describe the nature of this investment and how should we understand its growth as an industry?

Brian Regan 2:19
I think what’s happened, generally speaking over time, is that large, predominantly starting with US pension funds and then expanding over time to foreign sovereign wealth funds; university endowments; large, wealthy individuals; insurance companies; and the like have recognized that diverse portfolios that include exposure to both public securities, be it stocks or bonds and alternative assets, is a way for them to fulfill their obligations to their constituents, which in our case is several very large, public pension funds — CalPERS, CalSTRS, New York City, State of Connecticut — that have these long-term, structural retirement obligations that they need to meet. They need to generate returns to satisfy those. For a very long time, private equity has provided an opportunity for them to enhance their overall portfolio returns by investing in large private businesses. We do a bit of both, but largely private businesses. The industry has grown up sort of alongside that mandate and has evolved quite a bit over the last 20 years or so. We’ve seen firms increase the kind of talent that we have around the table. Not just investors, but folks in our resources group, for example, that have operating backgrounds or consulting backgrounds that help our companies grow. It’s become a fairly efficient way for the market overall to allocate capital. It’s been a helpful way particularly for smaller and midsize companies that don’t want to have the cost or all the distraction of being a public company to get capital to grow or to provide liquidity to a founder or a family. You have a combination of factors — you’ve got the incremental or professionalization of the industry as well as this continued need for our large limited partners to generate returns.

Renee DeSilva 4:34
So with that level set, if you thought about the landscape from the lens of a large health system, how would you educate a leader about where capital is flowing and where the investment opportunities have emerged?

Brian Regan 4:47
On the first point in terms of where capital is flowing, healthcare used to be somewhat nichey from a private equity investment perspective. It contains some attributes that on the face of it don’t necessarily make it a logical place to invest especially for larger diversified firms that are looking across the world for opportunities across different sectors. It’s got a regulatory overlay to it, it has an oversight component to it, there’s certainly stroke of the pen risk. Some firms have shied away from last mile health care. However, over the last 20 years, it’s accelerated to where it represents close to, rough numbers, 20% of our economy. It’s too big to ignore. One of the particular things that have driven dealmaking in healthcare is that you have funds reorganizing themselves that initially were generalists, meaning the same partner might invest in multiple industries. Now they’ve organized themselves into sector teams. All of the large cap private equity funds, KKR Capstone, books like that have dedicated healthcare efforts. Then you have specialists like Welsh Carson that only invests in healthcare and technology. Then you move down market and you have even more specialists. We’re a little bit unique for our size with a $4-5 billion individual fund to invest in just two industries. Again, one of the major trends that have happened in terms of allocation of capital towards healthcare is that you’ve moved away, over the last 20 years or so that I’ve been in the business, from more of a generalist model to, even within firms and across all sectors, dedicated, sector-specific teams. The number of people out there with a mandate to deploy capital in healthcare has increased. Now, if you look at the Bain benchmarking data on healthcare, a lot of private equity has gone into pharma. A lot of that has gone into mostly pharma-related services, so contract research, contract development, healthcare IT, which is a business model, a lot of large private equity, understand because they also invest in software just like we do. Then you have the provider space, which is represented, call it 75% of our investing activity, but maybe only 50 to 60% of the overall market. That does still reflect a little bit of reticence for some private equity firms to get into investments that involve the actual provision of clinical care. I do think you will increasingly see investments in and around emerging business models. It’s typically specialized – imaging centers or ambulatory surgery centers or oncology as a service line versus health systems broadly defined. It tends to be specialized. From our perspective in terms of how providers or systems could benefit from that or harness it, we do most of our provider investing alongside large health systems, whether that’s co-investing at the company level or whether it’s joint ventures at the local level. You go back to the mid-90s when we started USPI with Baylor in Dallas. We’ve had a whole series of investments — Select Medical, Concentra, US Radiology, US Acute Care that have used either a local joint venture approach or a company level co-investment approach to involve other key constituents, namely, the systems in those businesses.

Renee DeSilva 8:39
Yeah, I think that’s great. So one of the takeaways for me as you’re speaking through this is through the lens of questions that board members should be thinking about and also just how CEOs are animating on this notion of finding good models of partnership and being willing to approach that, as you mentioned and that data point was helpful. So much of Welsh Carson’s history has been rooted in this notion of good partnerships. Let’s talk about that a bit more. When you think about the power of strategic partnerships and probably both being differentiated on the front end but also finding value across the relationship, what comes to mind for you in terms of the hallmarks of the most successful partnerships?

Brian Regan 9:24
To me, it starts with alignment. I think that exists or needs to exist if you’re going to be successful on several levels. One certainly comes back to equity ownership and again, that could reside locally or the joint venture could be at the company level, but having shared ownership is generally the best way to ensure alignment. Having a shared vision for what an asset should do/can do/could be, so having a strategic plan, having a formal plan or process around how you’re going to achieve that. I think having alignment on values is important. We’re very respectful of the fact that nonprofit systems are stewards of community resources and that they can and should have guardrails around quality, patient satisfaction, patient experience, both clinical and financial. Laying as much of that out upfront as possible, being as explicit as possible around that is probably the most important determinant of whether your partnership is going to succeed or fail. I think determining who the partners are, if you look at healthcare, any given transaction involves multiple constituents. You’ve got the hospital, you’ve got the surgeon, you’ve got the anesthesiologist, you’ve got the device manufacturer, you’ve got the insurer, you’ve got the patient, you’ve got the employer, the insurer is operating as an ASO, so thinking about where you want to play and then what are the key constituents that you want to be involved in your partnership? That selection process is incredibly important in terms of having a constructive partnership.

Renee DeSilva 11:19
When you look at the broader landscape of where Welsh Carson has invested, you’ve got these examples of where maybe you took an existing asset and found ways to accelerate and to invest in and build behind the management team. But I also think there have been some interesting examples of de novo opportunities that were grounded in policy or maybe other reads of the market where there was an unmet opportunity. Can you talk a little bit about that? How do you identify opportunities, particularly around where some of these policy gaps are and just the notion of business building de novo and how you all have approached that?

Brian Regan 11:59
We go through a process we call map and attack. It’s evolved over time. The current iteration of that I recently raised when I assumed leadership for our healthcare group here at Welsh Carson. We sort of democratized that process. I challenge our entire group to think creatively and come up with new ideas that sort of said, the intersection of three things. One is, we want to identify a space that has a positive secular trend or a particular need. As you referenced, that could be policy-driven, it could be market demand-driven, it could be innovation-driven, it could be economy of scale driven in terms of consolidation. Then we want to identify those sectors that have actionable assets for us. As you know, we’re largely a control investor. We need to have companies that are investable, meaning of a particular size or who are interested in taking private equity capital, unlike a hedge fund that can just go buy a share of any public company. We have to have a willing seller and a willing seller that has certain size parameters given the size of our fund. Finally, we have to have a reason why Welsh Carson is going to be different because we’re operating in a competitive environment. A lot of people have a lot of money. We want to understand what is our angle to win. That’s the process we go through to identify those themes. Particularly on your policy question, Tom Scully, former CMS administrator, former OMB healthcare PAD, and in the original Bush administration has been here for 17 years. He’s been a partner for 15 years. He’s got phenomenal connections in DC. He’s sort of a career healthcare technocrat who has, I think, incredibly reinvented himself as an investor. We’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of resources on connectivity, whether it’s to the administration, whether it’s to Congress. We’ve got a pretty broad engagement program around members of Congress. We were highly interested in what key committees of jurisdiction are doing, following the literature around where policy innovations might occur. There’s a formal structure for that now within CMS within CMMI. We’ve invested quite a bit in our DC footprint to gain insights into where the government is heading.

Renee DeSilva 14:33
If I play that back, you have a process to think creatively about where you ought to deploy capital, then you have investments that are in mind from a policy perspective to understand where those opportunities lie in the long term. I think some good examples of those coalescing are around Springstone and also InnovAge. I’d love to hear more as we move forward. How do you think about continuing to stay current and opportunities and how do you do that in the context of administration transitions and how that impacts how policy gets played out.

Brian Regan 15:05
One of the key hires that we just made is Adaeze Enekwechi. She was the healthcare OMB lead within the White House for the Obama administration and had a key role in the implementation of Obamacare. She has been involved in democrat healthcare policy circles for most of her career and has a really deep network. The Biden administration is largely populated on the healthcare side by alumni of the Obama administration, not surprisingly, and so we’ve continued to invest in that area and look for resources in addition to Tom who’s stayed incredibly connected for others to compliment him. There is a continual process of making sure that we have the right components as part of that policy assessment strategy. And then they can connect the dots to activity and positioning both within our portfolio as well as our new deal activity. So Adaeze joins us in June. We’re excited to have her on board.

Renee DeSilva 16:17
That’s great.

Brian Regan 16:18
Thank you for your help, by the way, Renee, in recruiting her.

Renee DeSilva 16:22
Yes. That does bring us to what you were talking about in the partnership, part of our discussion around looking for organizations that have a positive secular trend or need and places where you can make a significant investment. There’s one exception to that, which would be The Academy. So that the audience knows, I’ve gotten to know you through the general partners of Welsh Carson when the partners, not through the fund, made a strategic investment in The Academy in 2017. I joined The Academy in large part because of that transition. Talk a little bit about the exception to the rule. What was interesting to you about The Academy and how do you think about the rationale for this partnership in the spirit of all that Welsh Carson does?

Brian Regan 17:06
Yeah, well, first and foremost, it’s been a rewarding and productive partnership that just passed its third-anniversary mark, which is kind of incredible. We greatly appreciate your leadership. The fantastic development that we’ve seen, the growth and evolution of that business, the connectivity to our systems during COVID, was incredible. Now what we try to think about is, how are we going to produce first quartile returns on a sustainable basis, meaning fund after fund for our limited partners. Our primary product is our returns. Sustainability is a challenge in our business when you’ve got lots of very smart people with lots of capital. It comes down to what are our sources of sustainable, competitive differentiation. Ultimately, in our business, that’s a function of the talent you have. That’s sometimes hard to differentiate. But it’s also your intellectual property you’ve accumulated over time, your track record, where we do think we’re objectively different given a 40-year history, our network, and our connections. The Academy fits into two of those. It’s a wonderful source of intellectual property for us about what systems are doing in the market, how they’re thinking about the world, what their needs are, where they would like to deploy capital, where they might perceive they need a partner. But then also, you’ve got this whole ecosystem of industry customers, as you call them, or industry members, who are doing interesting and innovative things that may be opportunities for investment by us. On one hand, we’ve got our primary objective most days as finding attractive new investment opportunities and differentiating Welsh Carson to the sellers of those companies relative to the other people that are trying to bring them money. Having The Academy and just generally understanding our ecosystem and having deeper domain expertise in healthcare, relative to others. The Academy contributes to that, I think, increasingly well. The other is the network and we’re seeing something interesting in the space, maybe it is a joint venture model with systems or maybe developing innovative technology or services that can help systems be able to tap into that and to talk to senior folks across our health system members to give them opportunities to invest, to give them opportunities to joint venture, to help us think through that. We found that that can increasingly be a real win-win for both us and The Academy. The network is important and the IP is particularly important.

Renee DeSilva 20:02
I agree. I also think just where we find ourselves as an industry, the appetite for conversations in both executive forums that we convene as well as even just in boardrooms has never been higher to understand what’s happening outside of the provider org. The Welsh Carson connection for us has been a great way to make that happen at scale. I’m happy to be on this journey with you.

Brian Regan 20:27
It’s been good. I think more of that is to come. Think about the challenges that our businesses are facing. Just so people know, we have about 15 portfolio companies, those companies average $13-14 billion in revenue, we employ 110,000 people, and we treat 25 million patients a year. So if you aggregate our portfolio together, when we look at the world we don’t do everything end to end as your system members would, but we do a lot of the slices. Thoughts that we have, considerations we have, opportunities we have — whether it’s around efficiency or patient experience or clinical recruiting — you name the topic and we have quite a bit of overlap because effectively, we’re offering somewhat of a large, geographically distributed, deconstructed health system at any given time. And so I think a lot of considerations, a lot of strategies, how we deal with the increased share of our patient population as government beneficiaries, how we respond to some commercial pricing pressure, how we protect patients from large financial responsibility, things like that, those are all considerations that we have as well. So in effect, we’re kind of working through all of this stuff together. That provides lots of opportunities both to mitigate risk and to capture opportunity.

Renee DeSilva 21:50
I’d love to switch gears for the second part of our discussion given where you sit, the number of boards that you serve on. You work with, coach, and evaluate the performance of executives regularly. This gives you, I would imagine, a particularly unique view into what the most successful leaders look like. At the risk of me asking you these questions when in some ways, I feel like you also apply in my performance, I’m going to ask you, objectively speaking, nothing to do with the current conversation that we’re having, but when you think about the characteristics of highly effective CEOs, what comes to mind?

Brian Regan 22:27
So I think the number one determinant of whether CEOs are successful, particularly in larger organizations at scale, is the quality of the team that they build. It’s the depth and breadth of the talent they have around them, how they develop that talent, how they hold that team accountable. That, to me, is far and away probably the biggest job of a CEO. The job of a board, frankly, you could probably boil it down to making sure the company has the right CEO. There are considerations around capital allocation, strategy, president exit timing, and other things, but a lot of that does come down to who’s leading the business and how they are building a team that can navigate uncertainty, that can execute against a strategic plan, that can operate particularly in healthcare in a regulated environment where there’s a good portion of the population that believes that healthcare is a social good. You’ve got to be sensitive to all those dynamics. In healthcare particularly, the EQ, particularly dealing with physicians, for example, which a lot of our businesses do in some form or fashion even if they’re not physician services platforms, think being a clear communicator, a basic level of trust and credibility that you can establish with those folks. Most of our CEOs are highly relational people that have a relatively high EQ. And then finally, they focus on results. Private equity is sort of the ultimate meritocracy and accountability business at the end of the day. I get judged on two things — how much capital did I deploy and what rate of return did we earn on that? It is unbelievably objective. And so, we tend to gravitate to CEOs that have a similar mindset, that they establish aspirational but realistic targets for their team. They build that team in such a way that they can accomplish those targets. They hold people accountable, they’re creative, they’re resilient, but they’re ultimately objective-oriented thinkers. That’s not an easy thing. It’s sort of lonely being at the top sometimes so the other thing that we try to do, and I think The Academy does a lot of this through the peer network but is to develop boards where those CEOs have an outlet, not just in me or one of my partners as the financial sponsor, but to a CEO or retired CEO who’s done it before in that space or somebody that can they can reach out to because we certainly recognize there’s a unique sort of culmination of responsibility, accountability at that CEO level. Our objective is to make that person successful because if they are, the company is going to be successful.

Renee DeSilva 25:34
Yeah, I think that’s great. I’ve also just enjoyed being part of that. With my role at The Academy, I feel like I can be a student of effective CEOs. I spend a lot of time with both industry and health system members. Some of the things that have landed with me over the last couple of years have been that some are effective at tuning out the noise and getting to really what matters quickly. I respect that trait. I’ve heard many of our CEOs talk about, especially when you’re new in a CEO position, that you spend time on the things that you’d like to do, not always really where you should be focused. You sometimes can be too slow in processing human resource issues. I do feel like The Academy platform has been a great learning lab for me watching these folks manage significant size, scope, complexity, and across the year of COVID, having to do that with agility and a high degree of resilience has been a privilege in my mind to be able to watch. I appreciate your sentiments there.

Brian Regan 26:35
I think it’s spot on because one of the things that enable execution is to create order, simplicity, and focus out of chaos. If you’re running a 10,000 person business or a 20,000 person business the opportunity to get distracted is almost infinite. I find myself spending a lot more time thinking about where I’m going to spend my time. We’ve used the process, as you know Renee, with The Academy on a value maximization plan that tries to focus our companies on the three, maybe five key things that are going to make that company successful over the next two or three years. It’s often hard to look a lot longer than that. I mean, our investment horizon is in two or three years, but our planning horizon has kind of become two or three years. We’ve tried to be deliberate about what are the big levers. Oftentimes you have to sort through a lot of stuff to get those 2/3/4 things that you’re going to do well. Then you have to be very deliberate about what you’re not going to do. Again, it’s really easy for organizations to get distracted. It’s easy for organizations to get bogged down in change management. At the end of the day, for even big companies, the diameter of the pipe that you’re trying to fit all this innovation and evolution and other stuff through is only so wide. Be very thoughtful about where you’re headed, make sure everybody understands that, make sure you’re communicating — those are some of the things that I’ve found even in our own business are incredibly important when you’re dealing with the complexity of running a large private equity portfolio or an integrated health system that’s got 15 or 20 service lines. Understanding what’s important, narrowing down your focus on those things, and dedicating what I call a “proportionate amount of your time,” meaning what should be most of it, to those things. I think that’s a big differentiator.

Renee DeSilva 28:31
I think that’s right. Staying on talent but taking it in a bit of a different direction — over the last year you and I started to have what I would call very candid conversations around race, equity, and inclusion. I don’t know that we would have had those conversations if there was not a broader national dialogue that prompted all of us to get out of our comfort zone and sort of find our way navigating that. One of the things I have appreciated about the way that you’ve approached these conversations has been that you’re such a linear thinker and you’re very analytically oriented. I thought you were spot on in terms of how you thought about the business case. There certainly is a social and maybe moral imperative around equity and inclusion, just grappling with the issues that are challenging for our country. But there’s also the business case around equity which I think you articulate very well. Can you comment on that, if you wouldn’t mind?

Brian Regan 29:27
Yeah. I appreciate those discussions. They are sometimes awkward to have, I think we should admit that upfront. You don’t want to say something offensive but you want to be engaged. They are difficult to have, but I think it’s necessary to have. I’ve done a lot of reading on this. There’s a real science-based case for why diverse teams and diverse organizations tend to outperform. If you think about it, that’s certainly the case in private equity. I think I’d argue it’s probably the case in any business. Our primary output is returns and our primary input to that is decision making. Groups that all think alike don’t tend to produce the best decisions. If you back up to why people think alike, it’s usually because they have similar backgrounds, they have similar experiences, they probably look alike. That takes on a lot of different forms, certainly, race and gender are two primary determinants, but there’s a lot of others, including socio-economic that may or may not be tied to the first two. One of the things that we’ve had a very deliberate strategy around is being more inclusive and making it a focus. We’re doing that not just so we can put it on an ESG page in our LP presentation because I want our stats to look good or because we think that’s an expectation of our LPs. It is an expectation of our LPs, there’s a lot of discussion around that. Frankly, there are some downsides to the extent to which some of that’s being imposed in our culture and society today versus the extent to which we’ve enabled some of the organic arguments to come through because that’s more powerful. We’re doing it because I want the return side to look better. That’s ultimately what our constituents care about. They care about our returns and how we accomplish them. I’ve seen so many instances in which a deliberate focus on expanding the aperture and looking at non-traditional candidates or candidates that might not have been in the process historically and giving them an opportunity has produced just outstanding and sometimes unexpected results for us. It’s hard in my business because the development cycles are long. It’s a mentorship and apprenticeship business. The time from getting on a partnership track to becoming a partner is about 10 years. You need to start early, develop those folks, and give them the kind of positive feedback that enabled you to get where you are. I find it’s really easy to give that to somebody who probably does look like you or thinks like you or talks like you. It’s harder to reaffirm and project people to do it differently in a more senior role. We have a couple of really outstanding young women who are investment professionals with us and I tell them all the time that they should be running the firm in 10 or 20 years. Their EQ is higher than mine at the same age, they have tremendous analytical ability, they played college sports and understand teamwork, their connectivity to their peers is incredible. We need to make sure that we’re developing those folks at a young age and that we’re also helping them to see where they can get to within our organization.

Renee DeSilva 32:45
Yeah. I love that. I talk a lot about this. I call it the power of the nudge and noting to people things that you see that they might not yet see for themselves. I think about my career path and how at appropriate moments without that nudge, I would not have even lifted my head and imagined the possibilities. You did this for me too, not to be gratuitous in this conversation, but when I got the call to evaluate the Welsh Carson CEO opportunity I passed on it. Then we had a conversation and you sort of said, why would you not at least evaluate the opportunity fully before just not feeling like the time was right for reasons that were more about loyalty to where I was versus not feeling like I could do the work? I think there is a lot of power in the nudge and I do think people should continue to find ways to expand their social network. I appreciate that anecdote, Brian.

Brian Regan 33:41
Yeah, and what you also find, Renee, and I referenced this a bit earlier in the conversation on Adaeze is, when you have outstanding, diverse talent in your organization, they attract other outstanding, diverse talent. If you’re in a competitive environment for talent, which we all are, being the same as everybody else is not going. The way you generate first quartile returns, and I didn’t think about this, I think Howard Marks wrote a memo on this, the way you generate first quartile returns is to be different than the other 75% of people. If you only make the same investments as everybody else, you can never be, by definition, first quartile because you’ll just mimic their performance. You always revert to the mean or the median. The way you generate first quartile results consistently is to do things differently than your competitors are. We’re in the ultimate relative performance game. If we just do things the same way, if we look the same, if we think the same, we have the same group of people, finance, background, whatever, we’re not going to perform differently than our competitors. You approach the market from a different perspective. This is the business case which I refer to on this. The flywheel effect gets you other unique talent that other people don’t have access to and so to me, that’s powerful. I’ve seen the benefit of that in our organization. We’ve developed a critical mass in this regard or are starting to. We can attract some different people because of that.

Renee DeSilva 35:10
Alright, I’m going to close this out. Final question, a bit of a hard pivot from our conversation. The intention around creating this podcast, The Academy Table, is to just broaden the voices and perspectives in the industry. I know that one of the things that we all missed most in this last year and a half of sort of being in quarantine is that you don’t have the tables that are set with great food and great wine and good conversation. My question that I’ve been asking all of my guests is that if you were the head of the table and you could invite any two people for a conversation — fictional, dead, no longer alive — who would they be and why?

Brian Regan 35:53
I’m going to invite my three deceased grandparents. My paternal grandfather was a wonderful mentor to me. He was the first generation born in this country. He fought in the Pacific on a Fletcher-class destroyer during World War Two. He was an educator who was a principal. He was a renaissance man even though he came from very, very humble beginnings in Dunmore, Pennsylvania. He was just an incredible influence on me. I never got to meet my maternal grandfather. He, unfortunately, passed away before my mom was even married. My maternal grandmother was just a wonderful person; she lived to 101. She was caring and nurturing. I had a unique relationship with my grandparents as I was lucky to grow up within five minutes of all of them. Now that I have a family of my own, a lot of cool stuff that’s happened, I’ve been very fortunate in my life with my wife and my kids and my extended family, my friends. I’d love to spend an evening catching up with them. It’s not the famous person answer, but I’d love to spend one more night with my pop and my grandma and then meet my maternal grandfather for the first time.

Renee DeSilva 37:06
That’s perfect. Perfect. Well, Brian, I probably talk to you a couple of times a week, but I learned something from this conversation. I am so grateful that you joined us today. Thank you so much for your time.

Brian Regan 37:17
Thanks for having me. It’s been great.

Renee DeSilva 37:19
Thanks again for joining me at The Table. The Table is a podcast produced by the Health Management Academy. Make sure you catch future episodes by visiting our website theacademytable.com or by subscribing on the podcast platform of your choice. If you have suggestions for topics or guests, I’d love to hear from you. Please drop me a note at renee@hmacademy.com. I look forward to talking with you soon.