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Making Her Mark – Influential Women Business Owners: Mei Wang

April 29, 2019/in Featured Stories, Making Her Mark - Influential Women Business Owners /by Bernadette Abel

Switching Gears and Saving Lives: How Instapath Pivoted and Built a Business

“We need to do a biopsy” – Words that can cause a patient’s hear to skip a beat.  A biopsy removes cells or tissue from a suspicious area of the body.  Doctor’s then study these cells to see if a

Making-Her -Mark-Influential-Women-Business-Owners-Mei-Weng-Instapath

Credit: Instapath

disease – such as cancer – is present. Patients wait with hope and trepidation for their biopsies to return either “positive” or “negative.”

However, few people realize the first biopsy may not provide doctors with the desired information. Of the 5 million biopsies performed in the United States to diagnose cancer, 1 million must be re-done. This can cause more stress, and potentially delay a patient’s treatment by months.

When Mei Wang was a Ph.D. student in biomedical/medical engineering at Tulane University, she was astounded to learn that biopsies are unsuccessful so often. She and a group of fellow Ph.D. students looked into the problem.

The reason, she concluded, was the way in which these tests are done. Most biopsies use an imaging technique known as a rapid on-site evaluation (ROSE). The problem with this technique is that it captures only 1 percent of a total biopsy.  This small percentage is what typically leads to the inaccuracy.  An inaccuracy that can necessitate the uncomfortable and costly procedure being repeated.

A Microscopic View

making-her-mark-influential-women-business-owners-instapath

Credit: Instapath

Wang and her colleagues came up with a new approach. They use a digital microscope that takes a picture of the whole biopsy at subcellular resolution within seconds of removal, improving the speed and accuracy of the diagnosis. Wang believed it could also increase the likelihood the patient would return for treatment. When they presented their data at different medical conferences around the world, physicians and the medical community took immediate interest.

“Everyone said we should push forward because this was a significant clinical issue,” Wang says. “A few people from the industry approach us during the conference and said they were interested in what we were doing.”

With that motivation, Wang and her colleagues founded a company call Instapath, which is now based in Austin, Texas, to turn their idea into a product. Quickly, Instapath won several pitch contests for their concept, including an international pitch competition, receiving $30,000. The company also received a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant for $225,000 to perform their R&D.

Overcoming Negative Feedback

All this would make Instapath seem like a slam-dunk.  After all, they had come up with a solution to an urgent medical issue. However, Wang found a great idea does not necessarily make for a great business. This is especially true in an industry as complex as healthcare. While the need and the solution were apparent to her, the business did not come into focus.  So she set about interviewing more than 200 physicians and health industry participants.

Surprisingly, many of the first doctors she approached were downbeat about the idea. Many different kinds of doctors are involved in treating cancer.  As a result, the need for better and faster biopsies was not of equal importance to all of them.

Trudging forward after a string of negative feedback, finally, she found the medical personnel most interested in her technology: interventional radiologists. These are sub-specialists of radiology who use minimally invasive image-guided procedures to diagnose and treat diseases.

“When we started, they were pretty low on our list,” she says. “We started targeting neurologists and breast cancer surgeons.”

While the latter thought her technology was a “nice to have,” it was the interventional radiologists who felt their work was most impacted by frustrating delays in biopsy quality.

New Business Model

There was another surprise, though. While healthcare providers were interested in improving the diagnosis, the institutions that would pay for the technology – insurance companies and

making-her-mark-influential-women-business-owners-mei-wang-founder-of-Instapath

Source: Instapath

hospitals – had other concerns. They wanted a procedure that was more efficient and could be performed with fewer personnel. Wang, like many entrepreneurs, had to appease different constituents: the medical personnel who would influence the purchase decision, and the hospital administrators who would have to sign off on the sale.

“Without those interviews, we wouldn’t have a product that would sell and we wouldn’t have known who we were selling to,” she says.

Once the issues and concerns came into sharp focus, she changed her pricing plan and business model. Now, when pitching Instapath, Weng focuses on the fact that the technology “increases the throughput of biopsy procedures and allows more patients to be treated per biopsy suite per day.”

It is a subtle, but critical difference.  A difference that made the difference between having a great idea and having a great business.

“When you start a business, you often find yourself in the valley of despair,” she says. “But you quickly learn how to pivot, because you need to understand what your customer cares about and appeal to them.”


Editor’s Note: Lauren’s story is one of an ongoing series celebrating women business owners.  Take a look at some of the other inspiring stories in this series: How I Built My Own Business After Cancer and Launching Your Own Business as a Working Mom

https://kapitus.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/making-her-mark-influential-women-business-owners-mei-wang-scaled.jpg 1695 2560 Bernadette Abel https://kapitus.com/wp-content/uploads/Kapitus_Logo_white-2-300x81-1-e1615929624763.png Bernadette Abel2019-04-29 22:10:002019-04-29 22:10:00Making Her Mark – Influential Women Business Owners: Mei Wang
why-are-all-of-my-employees-leaving

Why Are All of My Employees Leaving?

April 22, 2019/in Featured Stories, Human Resources /by Bernadette Abel

Do you know what work your employees really enjoy doing? Most business owners and managers have no idea, according to a recent Harvard Business Review article authored by three Facebook executives and a university professor. “It spills out in exit interviews — a standard practice in every HR department to find out why talented people are leaving and what would have convinced them to stick around,” the article says.

A smarter approach is to figure out why people leave before they actually do. A recent study from the ADP Research Institute found that 5% of all workers leave their job every month, and most employee turnover is voluntary.

“Unemployment is at a 17-year low, and job switching is at a record high,” says co-head of the ADP Research Institute Ahu Yildirmaz. “It has always been important for employers to minimize turnover, but it is more critical now than ever before given the current state of labor market.”

40 Reasons for Leaving

The ADP study determined 40 factors that contribute to voluntary turnover. Those factors can be categorized as: “Pay, promotion, overtime/premium time, commute, experience-and-tenure, and other job characteristics.”

The specific influence each of these categories has on causing employees to leave varies by industry. Pay and promotion are the main drivers of voluntary turnover. Commute time, the study found, is a more important factor than experience and tenure.

Understanding why employees leave can help a company in a couple of ways. First, this can guide you in hiring. If you know that a long commute is a significant factor in why a certain class of employees tends to quit, you might re-consider whether to hire someone who will spend an hour on the freeway each day getting to work.

These insights can also help you determine which of your workers are likely to leave.  They can also help to uncover workplace issues you need to address. Perhaps you can offer remote work or a flexible schedule to that worker with the long commute. If good workers are going elsewhere because of benefits, you may need to reconsider your benefits package.

Conduct Stay Interviews

What’s the best way for a company to figure out what is causing its turnover issues? You no doubt have done interviews when you were deciding to hire someone.  And, many of you might have conducted “exit interviews” after someone leaves.

Susan Heathfield, a people management expert for TheBalance, suggests you also conduct “stay interviews” to determine the reasons that employees remain at your company. “Then, pay attention to and enhance the factors they identify that keep them coming back every day,” she suggests.

If you pay close attention to the reason employees leave, there’s a good chance your turnover will decline. And the workers who stick around will be more productive.

https://kapitus.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/why-are-all-of-my-employees-leaving.jpg 1466 2200 Bernadette Abel https://kapitus.com/wp-content/uploads/Kapitus_Logo_white-2-300x81-1-e1615929624763.png Bernadette Abel2019-04-22 07:30:532019-04-22 07:30:53Why Are All of My Employees Leaving?

Top 5 Customer Service Books for Business Owners

April 18, 2019/in Featured Stories, Living Your Best SBO Life /by Bernadette Abel

In running a business, it can be important to think like your customers think; if you don’t, you may quickly fall out of favor with them as they move to competitors who understand their needs better. Yet projects such as creating a stellar customer experience, doing the appropriate research to understand customer needs and enhancing customer support and service interactions frequently take a backseat to more immediate issues.

Even if you can’t begin the aforementioned projects just yet, it doesn’t mean you can’t make some steps to getting to know your customer better and and make some day to day improvements in your interactions with them. The following five business books will help you get started. If you’re a business owner who wants to make sure they are in tune with their customers’ evolving needs, you need to read these books!

1. “The Service Culture Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Your Employees Obsessed with Customer Service” by Jeff Toister

top-5-customer-service-books-for-business-owners

Purchase here.

Using a step-by-step workflow, Toister’s sage advice will help you build your customer-centric business efficiently and pragmatically.

Written in a conversational tone that is free of jargon, Toister is known throughout the internet (from his training videos on LinkedIn Learning) for his straight-forward attitude toward customer service principles. In this work, he uses real world examples of both excellent customer service and not-so-stellar customer service experiences. He then explains how each experience will impact an organization’s reputation.

2. “The Million Dollar Greeting” by Dan Sachs and Janet Scott

top-5-customer-service-books-for-business-owners-the-million-dollar-greeting

Purchase here.

While The Million Dollar Greeting focuses on the hospitality industry, it offers many secrets to creating and developing a workforce who are both inspired and committed to your business — a secret recipe for success within the hospitality industry.

Sachs, a Harvard graduate, serves as president of Meerkat Restaurant Advisory, a restaurant advisory group. He is also a professor of business and entrepreneurship at DePaul University. For 16 years, he owned Bin36 restaurant group, which developed and operated multiple wine-focused restaurants. What makes this book unique is that the authors have intentionally spoken to people who work in both large and small companies across a wide range of businesses. This has allowed them to focus on something rare within the hospitality industry: the businesses that grow for decades, rather than the businesses that are hot for a couple of years and then quickly fall out of vogue.

3. “Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business” by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine

Outside In, designed for customer service enthusiasts, focuses on how your business can achieve long-term, sustainable success.

top-5-customer-service-books-for-business-owners

Purchase here.

Manning and Bodine have fourteen years of research behind them as the customer experience leaders at Forrester Research. This book offers a comprehensive roadmap that explains how businesses can achieve advantages with their customers. The book starts off by explaining the concept of the “Customer Experience Ecosystem proof”. The concept explains how “the roots of customer experience problems lie not just with customer-facing employees like your sales staff, but with behind-the-scenes employees like accountants, lawyers, and programmers, as well as the policies, processes, and technologies that all your employees use every day.”

The book then goes on to explain how first identifying and then solving these problems can and will dramatically increase your firm’s sales. At the same time you will also be decreasing your costs.

4. “The Customer Manifesto” by Pamela Hermann

top-5-customer-service-books-for-business-owners-the-customer-manifesto

Purchase here.

The Customer Manifesto is an excellent reminder that despite all of the technology developed, businesses must continue to be “people first” to achieve success.

Practically, this book explains how to get your customers to go from one-time customers to repeat customers. When you achieve customer loyalty, you will watch as your business grows and thrives, because your existing customers will bring new customers to you. This book provides many solid recipes for success that can easily be followed by business owners and operators. It also shows that by focusing on customer success for your clients, you bring success to your business.

5. “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” by Angela Duckworth

While this isn’t a customer service-specific book like the others, Grit is a fabulous explainer to help you achieve your business goals.

top-5-customer-service-books-for-business-owners-grit-the-power-of-passion-and-perserverance

Purchase here.

A 2013 MacArthur Fellow and professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania Angela Duckworth is the Founder and CEO of Character Lab, a nonprofit whose mission is to advance the science and practice of character development in children. But beyond your childhood years, Duckworth proves scientifically of how perseverance in both the workplace and in life will get you farther than you could have ever dreamed. Some practical advice from this book:

1.     Define what success looks like. (e.g. Running a successful pizza restaurant chain.)

2.    Clearly state your short, medium and long term goals, while also giving yourself stretch goals. (e.g. Sell 5,000 pizzas in the first quarter and 25,000 by the end of next year.)

3.    Put your goals into practice by stepping outside your comfort zone and testing your innovations or products through deliberate practice.

4.    Reflect and learn from the obstacles, challenges, failures you face.

5.    Never become complacent or satisfied — as there is always room for improvement. This requires you to become almost obsessed with your task at hand.

Want more to read?

Of course, there are tons of additional great books on customer service (and running a successful company) to consider including:

  • Would You Do That to Your Mother by Jeanne Bliss
  • Customer Winback by Jill Griffin
  • The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek
  • How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
  • Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose by Tony Hsieh

It’s important to remember that while books are a great place to learn new strategies and ideas, it is also important to put these strategies and ideas into practice.  So start testing and iterating to determine which strategies works best for your business.

https://kapitus.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/top-5-customer-service-books-for-small-business-owners.jpg 1467 2200 Bernadette Abel https://kapitus.com/wp-content/uploads/Kapitus_Logo_white-2-300x81-1-e1615929624763.png Bernadette Abel2019-04-18 13:58:072020-12-14 21:42:46Top 5 Customer Service Books for Business Owners

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