Prime for Growth Episode 4 - Innovating through Category Creation

If your business dreams include breaking amazing new ground, solving problems previously undefined, and doing something entirely new, this episode is for you.

Today we meet Chris, who after 20 years of pursuing her medical profession, found herself at a cross roads where she could stay with what she knew, or take the road, not just less travelled, but break new ground, by building a brand new category of business.

For those of you who have read "Blue Ocean Strategy", this will be a great exploration of the model with an incredibly bright and articulate R.N. who found herself being more than just "a nurse with a business' - in fact she created a new business category in the conservative legal market where the foundation is literally in "how we have always done things", in other words, legal precedent.

Building a business by innovating a new category is, let's face it - not for everyone.  It can take years to succeed, your main barrier is that your prospective clients probably don't even know that they need you, and your primary tool is educating on the opportunity and hoping to get that one convert who will help you gain momentum.

Chris Rokosh did this, and 20 years later, has both the scars and the success story to show for it.  Her journey isn't just about getting here - it's about staying focused on the core values and purpose that drove her along this path after the door was kicked open by a chance conversation that lit the spark of an idea.  The hard work came after that - as we learn from other stories of innovation in category as well. 

Get inspired by this conversation with Chris who is an amazingly articulate, compassionate and insightful human who has walked the talk and invests daily in becoming a better entrepreneur and leader, with her company Connect Medical Legal Experts , on our fourth episode of Prime for Growth. 

Transcript

Angela Armstrong  0:00  
Welcome to Prime for Growth, a podcast about the journey of possibility that entrepreneurs live every day. Our conversations with these everyday innovators explore why, when and how they implement change in their businesses. And sometimes what happens when they don't. I'm your host, Angela. I've been working with entrepreneurs while growing a financial services company for more than two decades. I've learned a lot from our clients over the years. And I hope you will, too. Thanks for joining us on prime for growth.

Today, we meet Chris Rokosh, who is a nurse for 20 years before a chance call from a lawyer looking for a medical expert witness for a court case landed her in a space to explore what I call a blue ocean strategic moment.  despite the fact that she had never done it before she became intrigued and started recognizing that there was huge demand, but then she couldn't fill it all because she didn't have all the expertise required. So what started out as a service for training some of her peers, and how to be a medical witness, turned into a business where she has many, many consultants working for her across the country. In fact, she spurred an entire category in the country.

You started out in caring for gorgeous little babies. And then you transitioned into this new world. What was that journey? What was the moment like that tipping point where you said, this is a service that needs to exist here? 

Chris Rokosh  1:36  
Sure. Well, that's a great question. It's a story I really like to tell because even now, I kind of look back on it with some level of amazement, because I'm what my story is, I've been nursing for a long time. In fact, last year, I got my 40th or 41st years of being registered as a nursing Oberth in fragile nations. 

Angela Armstrong  1:57  
Oh, Chris. 

Chris Rokosh  1:58  
Like, how did that happen? Like when did that happen? But after I spent a great part of my life in labor and delivery, you know, helping a by my best estimate, I've been there for 10,000 deliveries of a beautiful babies in many different hospitals and places.

But after I've been working for about 20 years ish, as a nurse, mostly in labor and delivery, I was asked to provide an expert opinion on a medical malpractice lawsuit where things have gone wrong in the birth, excuse me, in the baby had been quite damaged. from, you know, the allegations were that the baby be quite damaged from a lack of adequate care and in during the labor and delivery. And a lawyer asked me to provide expert opinion on this case. It's a role I didn't even know existed, to be honest. But you know, I'm a yes kind of gal most of the time. So I said, Sure, I'll take a look at this case for you and give you my opinion on whether or not the nurses and doctors or the nurses in particular did what they were obligated to do based on standards of care and standards of practice at the time. And there were a lot of issues in it, it was fascinating to look at, it changed my own nursing forever, to be honest with you, because I just thought I'm never, never doing that again, or never not doing that again. But um, the case ended up going just almost to court. It was literally the night before I was scheduled to go to court to appear as an expert witness and provide my expert testimony in front of a judge who would make a decision and it really on the case after they'd heard all that, you know, plaintiff's defense evidence. And anyway, it was settled on the courtroom steps the night before. The whole process, to me was terrifying, and thrilling at the same time. And I've always thought that those two emotions are just a thread apart. Fear and excitement, in my mind are almost the same thing. It's just kind of how you frame them. But I, I talked to the lawyer after it was over and I said, How did you find me? And he said, Well, you know what I just asked around, and I needed someone with your level of experience. I needed someone who could teach and speak and write.

And I started asking, and ended up in that conversation. We talked for a long time to the end of that conversation with he said, I have a hell of a time finding good experts. And I just heard that in my bones. I thought, well, I'm nursing for 20 years. I know lots of nurses and doctors. And I could help you with that. And out of that single statement from one lawyer who I'm still very good friends with today because I tell him all the time you change my life. I started,  I did some more expert witness work myself. And then I developed a training program to teach nurses how to be good experts and I borrowed and you know, I mean, this is big business in the United States. And I borrowed and studied and examined and did lots of time on my own internship, developed a course and then developed a built a business out of finding experts for lawyers. And in the midst of that, at the same time, I've also kept an education component to the company to because as I learned more about law, and how law can support medicine, and and I was learning through my own work as an expert witness how medicine can support law and right outcomes, better outcomes across the table. I've still to this day kept an element of medical legal education, and I teach as much to lawyers and doctors and nurses. As I do, I teach to them equally, because I really think the shared information makes us all better. In fact, I'm just hosting a webinar on Thursday. And the audience is a beautiful mix of plaintiffs, lawyers, defense lawyers, doctors and nurses, with a doctor and lawyer presenting, because I think we need to, this is a conversation we all need to be having, because we're better if we know more. And as a young nurse, I never really truly understood the the medical the legal risks of my medical job.

Angela Armstrong  6:15  
 On the subject of medical malpractice, entire libraries are dedicated the complex system that evaluates as Chris's medical expert witnesses do in a factually neutral way, the real impacts that patients may suffer in cases where the standard of care has failed for some reason. Sometimes the failures are simple human error, sometimes their staff overwhelm, sometimes there's new knowledge that's required. Hospitals can be slow to change, because they're big institutions. And one of the credible functions of the intersection between the legal and medical communities is to bring standard of care gaps into the spotlight, and prevail on the medical community to review, revise, and adopt better practices to improve clinical care and outcomes.

So I'm curious about patient care. And of course, this is a great segue into what you do, which is think about not just medical ethics, which I'm sure is a philosophically a huge field, as opposed and then practically in its application, a huge field, but just the, the humanity of the field of medicine where people err, people make mistakes -  that happens.  When I got my knee operated on, they gave me a sharpie. And they said, this is how we make sure we don't operate on the wrong knee. Yeah, after I wrote on my knee, I was like, this is a good idea, but it is kinda scary that we have to do that somebody would say your left knee, not the right knee.This is where this is where your business came about. 

Chris Rokosh  7:49  
But first of all, the concept of why medical malpractice exists was foreign to me, you know, I thought it existed to just scare the hell out of us all the time every single day, and just to be a thorn in the side. But the truth of the matter is, it exists to help patients who are injured at the hands of health care providers through no fault of their own, it's assist, it's a necessary system. And when I sort of understood that, and looked at it from if that was my mom, my daughter, my son, my husband, I would want some kind of recourse for damages to fix this situation.

You know, because many people who are injured are severely injured, and there is no going back to work and there is no social life. You know, there's there's destitution in many ways by people who are seriously injured. So, um, what I really didn't know. And acute care is so busy and labor and delivery is so busy, you know, things happen, and then people go home and you're on to the next patient. I really, in my lifetime of nursing never grasped the concept of what that meant when the baby was born. And let's say there was seizures in the first 24 hours of life, and there were issues and they went home. I never connected that in because then it just went, they went home and life went on. I never connected 

Angela Armstrong  9:16  
delivering baby number 9999. 

Chris Rokosh  9:19  
Right, yeah, on that shift some days. And I never connected to what it was really like the experience of the family going home with that child and the long term effects and damages potential damages. So I didn't really know that I do a lot of connecting nurses with outcomes because I don't think we always healthcare is a great big moving ship. And information sometimes doesn't trickle down for years. And outcomes don't always trickle down at all. And policies and procedures don't change until things something really serious has happened. And even then it's got years of transformation to go through before it actually changes anything at the bedside regarding the bedside care. But the other thing is, I don't think I understood and I don't think many nurses understood, how does the How does the court view your responsibility as a nurse?

What are the standards that you're going to be held up against?

Angela Armstrong  10:11  
 Like, how do the courts know, on average? How would they know? 

Chris Rokosh  10:14  
Well, they, that's why they hire me, experts like me, you know, and all the experts who work with us, is like a lawyer will have to say to them, you know, the reason that Angela had to put a sharpie X on her left knee before she went into surgery, is because the standard of care requires that everybody going into that operating room is clearly aware of which limb you're going to be upgrading on. And that came about because there have been some wrong knees operated on as you can only imagine, you know, that's a slam dunk medical malpractice case right there, the wrong lane gets cut off or operated on or the wrong breast gets taken off. All those things happen. Not that frequently, Mind you. I mean, don't get me wrong here. Because I know from working in hospitals, that most of what goes on is magic. I mean, people get healed and babies get born and cancers get cured. 

Angela Armstrong  11:08  
And we live a long time because of not just our good food and good nutrition in our part of the world anyway, but because we have excellent intervention and and yeah, good support for our health. 

Chris Rokosh  11:24  
Yeah, it mostly works, which is really good. But when it doesn't work, that's where I built a business out of finding the experts that lawyers need to tell them exactly the standard of care and causation issues like what should have happened in this situation? Was this preventable? And if it was, what standards were missed or overlooked, or what breaches in the standard of care occurred, that, that this accident happens. So the largest part of my business is finding expertise for lawyers and all sorts of malpractice cases, and sometimes criminal cases. And sometimes, you know, Department of National Defense cases, depending on where the issues are. But the secondary part of my business is education, just telling nurses, everything I've learned throughout this and doctors and say, don't let me there's five or six reasons why nurses can repeatedly get sued and just bring that to their attention and say, Stop, stop doing this. Let's, let's talk about the real life consequences of these issues. And just get better.

Angela Armstrong  12:29  
I think of what you're doing is more sort of creating a purpose statement for the medical practitioners to say -  Our purpose is to deliver with the highest integrity, the best standard of care and in the best sense of personal responsibility to the situation that we can to bring the best that we can to the situation and acknowledge there is humanity, and we have error. And that's why there is insurance that way. That's why there's recourse. We put guardrails in place in yours are sort of the thinking guardrails when you're doing this education to say, this is the why this is your purpose statement. And remember, these guardrails are to protect you and the patient to just bring you back into a sense of awareness. Because you can get into rote,  you can get into status quo, you know, if you're binge watching, you probably have you stopped paying attention to the fact that you haven't moved all day. So if you're doing something repetitively, even like we were talking about earlier, maybe forgetting to wash your hands, because you just got busy and you and you forgot 

Chris Rokosh  13:39  
That those are other challenges of buisiness. And acuteness in an in our hospitals are real, you know. So it's not, it's as as much as things can get really routine, they can also get completely overwhelming because there's so much going on, and a real lack of knowledge. And sometimes you're working on a unit you're not that comfortable and familiar with, there's a lot of that going on right now in the midst of this pandemic, or poorly educated around to jobs that they may not know as well as they'd like to know. And so, there's a lot of there's a lot of barriers to being focused and present. And, you know, there's it's easy to make mistakes, but I like how you said that, you know, kind of providing a framework. The one thing is the public puts a tremendous amount of trust in health care. And as nurses, we are incredibly fortunate to be the number one trusted healthcare professional. Oh, last time around, firefighters beat us out after 911 you know, for a little while, but I think we're way up there. And I always try to remember, you can't take that lightly. People are literally putting their life and their trust in your hands. And you can't oath ever overlook that just for the sake of this is a job and I have to go to work and I I'm tired, even though those things are so real, you know, your kids are sick too. And your dogs at the vet and your husband's lost his job, those things are as real for nurses as they are for everybody. But there's also always, always has to be that elevated sense of, I'm here to do a job and I have to do it safely. And I have to do it with care and compassion. And then it's walking the fine line or not giving all that away before you you know, then go home and yell at your husband and kids, my kids husband, and kids will tell you I, you know, unless they were literally bleeding out of their mouth and barely alive didn't get much of much of my attention.

Unknown Speaker  15:40  
It's a big burden. Like I think about the the overwhelming responsibility to literally have someone's wellbeing in your hands. I mean, I raised with my husband, two beautiful young women, and there was a lot of sense of responsibility of making sure that they could get to adulthood , you know, I just feel like they were not mine, I was just curating them on their own life journey to some place where they could manage to stand on their own, and I would still be there. But I would have to step back and say, Okay, I, you know, the strings are cut, now you're on your own. So, for a nurse, nurse that's practicing in this healthcare field, that sense of responsibilities, it's weighty. And I'm sure, sometimes it's exhausting, especially when you think about the the overwhelm and the franticness of everything that's going on right now in so much uncertainty.

Angela Armstrong  16:39  
While most medical procedures have a high success rate, there's still a cost that's worth reducing on the patient side and on the insurance side. Medical errors have been estimated to be the eighth leading cause of death in the US. And the third in Canada, right behind heart disease and cancer. Spending on health care in the US represents 17% of total GDP, and is growing faster than the economy itself. Canada spends about 11 and a half percent of GDP on health care. These are not insignificant costs. And so anything that causes reflection, adaptation, and improvement is certainly worth the investment.

When did your business go from being primarily education? Like what was that tipping point before you started to feel like, there? This is real? It's it's got a momentum of its own? 

Chris Rokosh  17:34  
Yeah, that's a that's a really great question. Because I, I would say I started out. I mean, I didn't have a master plan. I'd like to say I did, but I didn't have a master plan of how this would look. And so I started out just, you know, I was working as a nurse, and I was giving x, I was doing some expert witness on the side. And so I started out just teaching nurses how to be expert witnesses. And over time, the nurses would say to me, I want to do the work that you're doing. And us nurses, by nature are not necessarily entrepreneurial, or not many of us were employed in big government, jobs, and we work in teams. And we aren't, we're not huge outside risk takers, typically. So it probably took about, I taught the courses over two years, and I had a couple of 100 nurses trained on how to be Legal Nurse Consultants. And they were saying to me, Chris, I'm going to work now, like help me find work. And I was at the same time doing my own expert witness work with lawyers and lawyers were saying to me, you know, because I gave all expert opinion, typically, on obstetrical cases or operating room cases or things that fit within my area of expertise. I couldn't give expertise on an ICU case. And you know, other things I er cases and other things that weren't within my so lawyers at the same time, were saying to me, could you find me a good emergency room nurse? I was like, well, as a matter of fact, I can. 

Angela Armstrong  19:01  
stakes are high. When a human beings health has been compromised, and another human accepts the task of helping remediate the problems, there are a range of things that arise, starting with the patient's emotional experience all the way through to their outcomes after the patient returns to their home environment. Humans are complex biological entities, each unique physically and psychologically.   Managing the process of wellness and the interventions performed by medical professionals always has risk and the guardrails established by access to litigation ensure that conversations are held on risk behaviors, risky practices, and risk filled environments to improve them for the future.

Chris Rokosh  19:44  
You have to teach the nurse how to write a great CV for the legal world how to put together a resume and then you know, connect the two of them and then teach them how to write a great medical legal expert report and which is a trickle all into its own. There's a lot of requirements for what that report has to look like.  So it started there just with one or two nurses and then eight or nine nurses. And then they, you know, lawyers would say, do you have a? Do you have a surgeon who could also give opinion on this case, and this is over three or five years, this was all going on. And I would literally send my mom in the beginning to the library to read through old court documents to see to see what surgeons had given testimony in court previously, and had been accepted by the judge. And it happened quite slowly. Thank goodness, I wanted it to happen faster. But when it did happen fast, I was like, Oh, thank God, this didn't happen five years ago, and I was not ready for this. Be careful what you wish for. Right? Right. Yeah. And I would say, so I taught my first education, I did my first case in about 2001. I spent a lot of time learning and entertaining myself, because I, you know, it's never lost on me when an important role This is it's not.  It's not bedside care, but it's no less important. It's upholding the standard of care. And at the end of every lawsuit is a patient who's been injured and their family and all the problems and problems that they're dealing with. So I took this very seriously to heart as a new part of my profession, not just a whim, not just an idea, but as a new part of my profession that I needed to do very, very well. So over three or five years, I started to build a team of experts and continue teaching the courses. And I would say by about 2012 ish. So four years after I started teaching, I had I had quite a booming business, I had started to hire people, my husband had left his job. And you know, he's got a great IT project management background, and he was a great assistance. You know, since that time, we've just grown and grown and grown to the point that we have about somewhere between 250 and 300, experts working every single day, on cases across the country. And as lawyers asked for, you know, sometimes they need a midwife or a respiratory therapist or an occupational therapist, or someone who runs a radiology clinic or a pediatric surgeon who works with a very, very particular type of equipment in a very, you know, particular sized Hospital in this particular province. So I now have a team that just does nothing but to find the exact right expert and connects them with lawyers. 

Angela Armstrong  22:28  
In Canada, there's an organization called the Canadian Medical Protection Association. It's funded by doctors, but the funding comes to the organization directly from provincial budgets. This has the effect of lowering the cap rates for litigation and managing it as part of the overall health care costs.   

In the United States, the litigation system is such that it causes huge variability in medical malpractice insurance rates. For example, an obstetrician practicing in one state may pay $20,000 in premiums per year, in another state $220,000. A US Library of Congress medical malpractice review about Canadian health care says that the caps that are in place on pain and suffering really do help to control healthcare costs. In 2002, medical malpractice as a proportion of health spending was 1.7% of the United States, but only .47% in Canada. Total Cost of settlements, legal fees and insurance was $4 per person in Canada, but over four times that in the US.   In the United States in 2018, over $4 billion was paid out in medical malpractice settlements.

Chris Rokosh  23:47  
It was a lot of because it was a new service, and I was an unknown person coming out of the blue and a nurse, you know, besides not a lawyer, there was a lot I wouldn't say it was hard to break into the industry, but I had to be patient. It took time, I had to build trust, I had to build relationships. There's so much in that legal world that's built on precedent. And both line healthcare are slow moving Ships, and they're not going to turn around anytime soon. So that was a big part of it is,   is just inserting myself in there into the legal world and normalizing the role of expert witness in the medical world. You know, there was a lot of like, I could never say anything bad against a nurse or a doctor. There's a lot of that kind of thinking initially, but through the teaching of understanding the rights of the public to file a medical malpractice case and the responsibility of experts to uphold the standard of care and their profession to not it's not a good old boys club where we do what we do and this is our culture. And this is how it goes, it's upholding excellence in health care. 

And so there was a lot of teaching on both sides and a lot of building trust on both sides. And then building that bridge. I mean, my company name is connect to medical legal experts. And it's building that connection between healthcare and law. And having all of them trust me, and trust us as a company to do what's right and what's best without any bias about who's right or wrong. Because we get I find experts for plaintiffs lawyers for defense lawyers for like I said, Department of Justice Department national defense, I can never be seen as someone who's is, is biased or judgmental about anything that's happened. It's very factual. This is what happened. This is what the standard of care was in place at the time. This is what should have happened. And then this is the outcome. So never though thinking anybody's right or wrong or good or bad. Just once the standard of care met in this situation, and then, you know, there's doctors who have the job of putting together the issue of causation.

But I mean, that's, that's a different topic. But  that's how it when it's taken many years, I'm I'm now 20 years into it just like you, Angela 20 years Exactly. in it. It's been a journey. It hasn't been fun. It hasn't been easy. It's taken a tremendous amount of grit and persistence, and, you know, courage for lack of anything else, or maybe just completely uninformed optimism. I'm not sure what it is there. But it's been a, you know, here I am. And here you are. 20 years. 

Angela Armstrong  26:39  
Yeah, you know, it's a, it's a journey of, it's a combination of having a vision, and then being curious about whether you can execute on that vision. And I'm sure you and I and every entrepreneur that I've had the privilege of meeting has not just one moment in their journey, where they go home, think I dont really think I know what I'm doing. And I don't like the term fake it till you make it because it seems like it sort of implies that your intention is to defraud people. And of course, that's not it. But it's to say I have a vision, I just don't have perfect clarity on what the right path is 

87% of the 137,000 businesses that are started daily, end up closing, the vast majority of those close at the founders discretion. But if the 13%, who do make it past that initial stage, only a small fraction of those are dedicated to building an entirely new category. 

Building a business in a known market is daunting enough, you still have to overcome friction to your clients that includes existing relationships, incumbent brand recognition,  and having very clear differentiation between your offering and the competitors offering. Building a business in a brand new category is an even bigger leap of faith. Because your clients may not even know that they need what you're offering. This was Chris's scenario, the concept of medical legal expert witnesses was working well in other countries. But Canada has a very conservative approach to adopting new things and ideas ended the existing framework was very functionally engaged.

Did you ever have a moment where something went direly wrong? And I mean, dire from your vantage point, and you weren't felt very defeated? Did you ever consider -  Maybe I need to give this up? 

Chris Rokosh  28:37  
Oh, yeah. How much time do you have? I think I could answer that on a couple of different levels on a very personal level. When I started out as an expert witness that I was just solo for the first few years, you know, doing expert witness work myself, the first time I went to trial, I've never even been in a courtroom and the experience of being cross examined is, is not a pretty well, it keeps it's what keeps a lot of healthcare people out of doing any expert witness work, because, I mean, some people love the challenge. But most of us find it very difficult and incredibly grueling. And healthcare is not by nature adversarial. So when you get when you're in the hot seat, and the very first time I went to court,   I was cross examined for a long time alone in kind of a small town in a bad hotel. And of course, you're you're not sequestered. It's not like you're a jury, but you're under oath, and you can't talk to anybody can't phone anybody and say this sucks. You know, that was a very difficult experience. I was on the stand for a couple of days. At the end of the day, the judge the case was lost the lawyer that I had been hired by lost the case. And I given it what I thought was my best shot. And I you know, I believed in that case, there were some significant issues.

With a standard of care, things could have gone differently. But the case was lost. And I would see that first experience going to trial in an unsuccessful case. And I think we all have a tendency to take on and say, it's my fault. I was one. And it wasn't I know now that it wasn't, I was one witness out of dozens over a six week trial. But I took that loss Berry, and it was a, it was a baby case where a baby had died. And that one hit me really hard. 

Angela Armstrong  30:27  
And I mean, considering that was what got you into nursing, right that? 

Chris Rokosh  30:32  
Yeah, that was a very personal hit for me. And it took me and I did definitely have, you know, some days of thinking, what what am I doing? What am I doing here? I mean, it's so much more fun delivering babies and doing this, you know, but I kept going, and I can't even explain why. But in the business, there's been a couple of things too.  You know, the role of the Legal Nurse Consultant is big business in the US are 25 years old and 25,000, strong, and maybe 45 years old, 45,000 strong now. And the Legal Nurse as a legal adviser is very ensconced in law offices, and hospitals and risk management, insurance companies. And they do a lot of cost of future care, they do all sorts of things. And so I just boldly, you know, when I was getting started, I just thought, I'm just gonna take that model and bring it here. And so I had a couple of stupendous fail. Or I did, like, I literally did the dog and pony show from coast to coast, I went to my top customer offices, the biggest Malpractice Lawyers in the country, and tried to sell them on the idea of hiring a Legal Nurse Consultant for their office. And biggest fail ever, not one of them still to this day, 20 years later has a nurse in their office. 

So I've had a couple of a big losses like that, right? Why just saw an idea, which to me made perfect sense. And it's working well in other countries. And let's bring it here. And so I've had definitely a few days, and you know, I'd walk in the room, and I'd start my pitch, and they'd sit back and cross their arms. So I definitely had a few things like that, that make you question. Just your business approach your knowledge, your ideas. But, um, and I've, you know, it's been scary. The law, like I said, and a lot of the lawyers that we work with a lot of lawyers who do malpractice are very senior lawyers, and they have their way of doing things. The law itself is built on precedent. And it's, it's taken a lot of courage. And there's been a lot of, I don't know, failure, but certainly rejection of ideas that I thought would be brilliant that nobody else thought would be good at all. So I've definitely questioned without a doubt, and still do, you know, I think this is a very Up, up and down, I think being an entrepreneur is a very up and down kind of thing. And you can have the highest point of your entire career at 10 o'clock in the morning. And the lowest point of your entire career at two o'clock that same afternoon, based on what's going on. So I've just kind of had to learn to accept that and not get to Luckily, there's more good days and bad days right now. And, you know, just carry on. When you when you are in those depths, you know, when you come out of one of those.

Angela Armstrong  33:32  
Yeah , like this idea was brilliant. Why is nobody else seeing how brilliant This is? 

How do you retool like, could you have a process for going away and reflecting? Or? Or do you quickly discard and move on? What is your personal method for pushing through that? and resolving what, what are you going to do next? What comes next after the dip? 

Chris Rokosh  33:59  
Hmm. Well, I think it depends on the day, sometimes I can to kind of brush it off and say, you know, oh, well, but if I've invested a lot of time and energy and money into the idea, I think I mean, you know, I'm not I'm not against having a little drink. You know, I'm not a drinker, but certainly just sit down and calm down and change your frame of mind a bit.

I try to, I try to look deep and see what did I miss here? And I think, I think in that particular instance, with my brilliant ideas, I didn't actually go to the customer and say, What do you think of this idea, as nearly as in depth as I should have or to as many people as I should have? I just showed up with my idea without talking to the customer. And so I tried to learn what I can about why that I have failed. And then but that's just one part of it. And that's just your logical brain. And then you've still got all your emotions and stuff to deal with. I'm a big talker, I have a big family sisters, I have a great family and my kids are grown up, and they're great. I'm a yogi, and I try to meditate. And I get outside and walk when I can. But it's not an easy shake off sometimes, right. And sometimes I find myself pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing until it's just so obvious that it's a fail.

And then at some point, you just have to say, well, that that's not going to work. Move on. But it's a little bit of a messy process of me, Angela, I wish I had something simple that I could tell you that worked. And I could share it with everybody, and it worked for them too. But the truth of the matter is, you know, there's the logical issues to deal with and the lessons to learn. But then there's, you know, try not to beat yourself up to not be ashamed, don't be embarrassed, don't be. And to keep your heart open enough that you're back open and vulnerable, again, to try to try again, on your next new idea. With the knowledge that you've got. You know, you've learned from it, but you're not jaded and closed and afraid to try, you know, afraid to try again. 

Angela Armstrong  36:23  
How do you or then if you're coming out of a dip -  that sounds like there is some resilience, some acceptance and self reflection? I hear those are really important attributes of that resilience and agility piece. What about what is your favorite thing? How do you keep yourself fresh with that favorite thing about the learning about continuing to explore, you come up with new ideas? How do you keep yourself engaged creatively? After 20 years of doing this, of building this niche that didn't exist before in Canada? How do you then continue to find new ideas and push your own boundaries and your own envelope? 

Chris Rokosh  37:11  
That's a really good question. Because I wouldn't say after 20 years, I'm as fresh or as pushy as I was, but I my, I think my best. I mean, I'm really fortunate that every single case that comes through the door is very different. There's some common elements to that, but pido, there's a person and there's a story, and there's an outcome. And there's a particular type of expert that needs to be attached. There's no two cases that are ever alike. And, you know, we were talking about curiosity before, and I have an insatiable curiosity about healthcare and the law.

That's, that's been that keeps, keeps it, you know, keeps the juices flowing a little bit. But I think also, I tried really hard to listen very carefully, because I think because I've been stung by trying to bring new ideas to healthcare and laws that have been shut down. So, you know, and gloriously that I've tried to really listen and I get, I get my best sparks. I think just sometimes by casual comments, from lawyers will say, Man, I'm really having a hard time when, you know, it's like being a light bulb goes on, and I will throw myself into action. And try to make that happen. 

Angela Armstrong  38:26  
If you choose to build a business that is a category creator, there are some key ideas you can focus on to have success. Number one, find the early adopters, that doesn't necessarily mean go out and land a whale of a client. It might be that your model is solving an intractable problem for a group of users that later become your brand evangelists. There's a great story on this model, about how is the app on masters of scale.

Number two, ignore the competition. After all, if it really is a new category, defining yourself by what's already out there might just end up reinforcing the power of incumbency for your prospects. 

Number three, be unique in your offering, but find a way to insert your product or solution into your clients current model. This helps you get to that adoption stage earlier as clients don't have to change everything they're doing to go with you. When a client adopts that have them tell the story to your other prospects lever every success story into a new opportunity. Your sales model is going to be therefore as unique as your product is. 

Number four. Just as in real estate where the mantra is location, location, location. In New Category creation, it's education, education, education. Your marketing needs to be focused on finding unique ways to allow clients to experience the benefit that your product brings. Chris focused on educating all of the lawyers In the space that this service existed and could bring value to their cases, and she went coast to coast to coast on education, junkets delivering seminars, doing talks at conferences. And these are all still cornerstones of her brand marketing. You can also check out her more recent innovation, which is her podcast called inside medical malpractice available through her website. 

Number five, be focused and be brave. Although your clients might say to you, instead of what you are suggesting, what we really need is "this". Unless "this" is a much better idea with a really broad audience and potential prospect list, you can't be everything to everybody, and trying to do so or doing so justified by your "I need to make money" is a distraction that can really turn into a huge dilution of your funds, your resources, and your time.

Chris Rokosh  40:56  
And the other thing that's been a challenge that a continuing journey for me is learning how to be a leader, I jumped into this, as a nurse who'd never done any kind of entrepreneurship, you know, or not much anyway. And this, you know, and for a long time, I just thought of myself as just a nurse who had a business. But over time, I've really had to, as I'm sure you know, grasp the concept of leadership and become a strong leader. And you know, the time that we're in right now, with the COVID pandemic, become a strong leader all over again, even on days when you were struggling as much as everybody else is struggling, you know, with this stuff, because we were talking, I, you know, I'm a Type A extrovert, and this has been some kind of personal hell for me to be isolation for this life. But I'm learning how to lead and learning how to lead in this particular time,

has presented a new challenge for me almost every single day, you know, get up, get dressed, do your hair gets makeup, it's show up, show up your best self because your people need you. And like I mentioned just briefly earlier, I I've never been nursing and I'm grateful for this, I have never forgot what an important job this is, I feel a huge sense of responsibility to give it my best. And to just never ever think this doesn't matter, or I can be tired, or I don't, I can just do this and then be done with it. I never think that so that's made me a bit of a perfectionist, which has its own, you know, difficulty we could talk about for a day and a half. But I try to stay motivated, because I know that there's a person on the other end of everything I'm doing. And I know that malpractice affects hospitals and societies and patients and families and law and health care and our social systems. So I just try to remember that I don't always you know, I mean, some days I'm just like, Damn, this is hard. But I do try to remember to never, never forget that the important part.

Angela Armstrong  43:01  
As far as category creation goes, I love this story of Clarence Birdseye. He was a native of Brooklyn, New York, but he spent time in Labrador, Canada between 1912 and 1917. While there, he observed how the local indigenous peoples would catch fish in the winter, and allow it to flash freeze, thereby preserving it. What he also noticed when he tried it himself was that the freshness of the fish was so much better, the quality and the taste, the texture were all really good.

A few years later, working with a fishing lobby back in the US, he learned about a huge problem. In the industry, massive quantities of caught fish were spoiling before they could get sold, representing a huge amount of loss profit.

At that time, frozen food was really unappealing to consumers. Because of the strategies that they use to freeze the food created crystallization, therefore, creating a really deteriorated quality and taste the products. So frozen food was actually considered a really inferior product. He applied his knowledge of flash freezing to the this business problem and formed his first frozen food company in 1923. Unfortunately, the idea is never quite enough. He ran out of capital in a few years, because the market was really slow to adopt. It cost him a lot of money to generate the technology in order to do the flash freezing, and he just couldn't get all the way through. He partnered with another company  - he continued to pursue, and over time, they had success. They had to package the product in a completely new way. So they had to innovate the packaging. They didn't have good transportation avenues. It was not that common for people to have grocery cases were freezing, so they had to help innovate display cases. They had to innovate all of these problems one at a time. At the same time educating the consumer that this product had better quality better taste and was more nutritious than traditional frozen food, in fact, was as nutritious as fresh food, they had to change the consumer buying behavior. 

It wasn't until World War Two, when they got their first really big growth spurt, when men went to war for women went to work and the need to put a nutritious quality, fast meal on the table became more imperative than ever. The frozen food industry is a $300 billion industry today.

Category creation isn't easy. And it took clarity, years of solving the barriers to market one at a time to be ready to take advantage of the market when it finally arrived. If you're going to pursue this method of business model, you're going to have to rely heavily on the skills of patience, grit, and determination.

When you talked about having a closet full of case files that sometimes you need to distance yourself from and what I know about you, Chris, is that your heart comes with you wherever you go. , I mentioned your Your smile is like an embrace. It's so welcoming. And I think that's your your avatar, Your smile is the avatar of who you are really, it is it is you. So look at those case files, where there is pain, there's gonna be pain on both sides of the table. There's a patient that suffered, but there's a medical provider who never wanted that outcome. And, and so everyone has to navigate their way through this incredibly difficult thing. And, and there are you are in the middle, but the act of putting those boxes in the closet. - so that is that your active disconnection from what do you do all day long is connected, is that you maintain a bit of sanity as well? 

Chris Rokosh  46:58  
Yeah, it is See, I'm going to cry now. And I just appreciate so much what you just said, because I do have, I have a lot of joy in my heart, my natural state of being is, is joyful. And this is a this is a tough gig, there's no doubt about it. But I do you know, like I was just saying I do take this responsibility very seriously. And that's exactly what it is to remove myself physically, and I can't I      work at home, my office is in my home and has been for 20 years. And I can't, I have an office with a door where the files are behind there. And then I leave here and I close this door and I go upstairs because I do need some separation from the weight of all, I'm happy to do it. And I think we all you know I think about the job you do sometimes Angela and the money you're dealing with and the stuff you deal with, like, to me that feels like a tremendous amount of weight to that I'm not sure I could shoulder. 

I think we all learn how to shoulder, pull our own wagon, whatever our wagon happens to be and whoever happens to be in it. But that's exactly what it is. Sometimes I just need separation from the hurt and the pain and the sadness and the disability and the devastation that comes from this. And it's a fine balance to see this and know all the bad stuff that goes on. But also know from 40 years of experience, the magic that also goes on in healthcare  - that a lot of good goes on. And then find the resolve in the midst of all that to try to make it better to try to heal what I can fix what I can open communication where I can.

Angela Armstrong  48:40  
Chris is a one of a kind. She took her passion for health care and patient support, into building a brand new category in the marketplace.  And now, her business connects legal professionals with medical experts, to help improve case outcomes for patients in Canada. a blue ocean strategy like Chris undertook is NOT for the faint of heart, it does take tremendous grit and persistence, and the ability to solve lots of barriers along the way. From educating the market that your service is necessary or even possible, all the way to, for example, Clarence's cold food distribution, where he had to actually innovate things like  how do I display my product in the market place. The barriers in a blue ocean strategy are not insignificant, they're just unknown. In the red ocean, you know what the competitors look like and how things are operating. In a blue ocean, you can exploit the fact that you dont have the same competitive pressures, however, the barriers are still there, they're just going to be different, and you may trip across them over the course of your business evolution.

If you're patient enough, persistent enough resourceful enough, a blue ocean strategy can be an incredibly rewarding way to build a business.

Prime for growth is produced by Prime capital with support of Canadian Western Bank, the bank for entrepreneurs who is obsessed with your success, and the business execution specialists Results Unleashed, who help you bridge the gap between strategy and execution. 

Till next time, go forth, and innovate