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Moises Eilemberg – Building in Life Science Asset Monitoring – Ep.221

My guest is Moises Eilemberg, CEO of XiltriX, a 24-7 life science asset monitoring business that started 5 years ago with 36 employees today and growing swiftly.
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Episode Description

Ep.221: Alex (@aebridgeman) is joined by Moises Eilemberg (@Meilemberg).

My guest is Moises Eilemberg, CEO of XiltriX, a 24-7 life science asset monitoring business that started 5 years ago with 36 employees today and growing swiftly. Moises is unique in that this is his second time as a CEO, his first being back in 2006 when he acquired a healthcare revenue cycle management company Avadyne, which he ran for 11 years before exiting, making 4 add-on acquisitions during that time.

Moises has a ton of experience to share leading teams, improving unit economics, building sales orgs, and managing the change that comes with integrating add-on acquisitions.

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Clips From This Episode

Acquiring Companies

Becoming Comfortable with the CEO Role

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(00:00:00) – Intro

(00:04:20) – Moises’ career & XiltriX

(00:07:02) – Becoming comfortable with the CEO role

(00:09:33) – When did you start acquiring companies?

(00:12:35) – How did your integration process change as you acquired more companies?

(00:22:14) – Is there a reason you chose to be in this industry?

(00:25:27) – What is the state of your market today?

(00:29:12) – Is the market fragmented to a point where there are M&A opportunities?

(00:31:40) – What’s driving the biologics growth over the past few years?

(00:33:30) – What did you apply from your experience at Avadyne into XiltriX?

(00:36:44) – What was your experience setting Sales comps?

(00:42:57) – What levers have you used to improve unit economics?

Alex Bridgeman: Moises, thank you for coming on the podcast. Really good to see you and your businesses have been super interesting to look at and read about and chat with you about. So I’m excited to dive into them. But would you be able to walk through kind of what XiltriX does and kind of the career roles that you’ve had that led up to this point?

Moises Eilemberg:  Sure, absolutely. And thanks for having me, Alex. It’s great to be here. I’m honored to have been invited to your podcast. So first, I’ll tell you a little bit about what XiltriX does. So, what we do is we monitor life science environments for ambient conditions. So a good way to explain it is if you think about an ADT home alarm system, we work pretty similarly, but instead of monitoring your home for burglaries, what we do is we monitor life science environments for things as simple as air temperature and humidity in the facility all the way down to specific temperatures and scientific ultra-low freezers, incubators, we might monitor things like differential air pressure, particle counts in clean rooms. All of these things are really important to monitor for different reasons, and we provide this as a service to our customers. So our customers pay a subscription for the monitoring service based on the scope of what they need to monitor. And we provide them with an ongoing service where we alert them if anything goes out of spec, and we are also there to help them with all kinds of quality related or FDA related audits that they may have to go through to make sure their products and their environments are compliant. So that’s what we do. We started XiltriX about five years ago, five and a half years ago now. And then before that, I was a traditional search funder. So I did my original search a long, long time ago. It’s going to be 20 years now since the time I started my search, so I started in 2004 and ended up buying a business in the healthcare revenue cycle space in 2006, which I ran for about a little under 11 years. We built it over those 10 years, a combination of organic growth and some acquisitions. We ended up putting together four companies over time, and then we exited that business in 2016. And then I started XiltriX. And before that, I was mostly on the private equity side, much more exposed to the investment part of the world rather than operations.

Alex Bridgeman: At Avadyne, you said you ran it for 11 years. Was there a certain year, or how long did it take for you to feel really comfortable in that role as a CEO between year zero and year 11?

Moises Eilemberg:  As I think about that, I think probably at least a couple of years. When I bought the original business that eventually became Avadyne in 2006, I had just turned 30 and I had never- I mean, I’d run relatively small teams in an investment firm type of environment, but I’d never really run much of anything, let alone a company. And so, it was pretty overwhelming, as I’m sure many of the folks in the search fund community can empathize. But I became CEO of this company, again, I was barely 30 years old, and we had about, at the time, somewhere around 90 employees, 85 employees, and most of the managers were way older and more experienced than I was. So, it’s pretty intimidating at the beginning, and I would say it definitely took a couple years to feel like I knew which side was up.

Alex Bridgeman: Was there a particular moment where the kind of last piece of the puzzle fit and you now felt like you were in a good spot and more confident in the role? Any particular moment or experience?

Moises Eilemberg:  I think it was gradual. And looking back, I made all kinds of mistakes. And so, I think it was a gradual process of trying different things and then realizing kind of what worked and what didn’t. And there were a lot of times along the way where I made a decision or handled something in a particular way that was definitely a learning experience of what not to do, which are probably the most valuable ones. So no, I don’t think there was a specific moment, but I think it was just sort of an accumulation of experiences, and I think, if I look back, I think that kind of builds exponentially over time. And so, yeah, I don’t think it was a specific moment.

Alex Bridgeman: And then you mentioned also acquiring four companies over that time period too. When did you buy the first one?

Moises Eilemberg:  So, the timeline was the first acquisition of the original business was in January of 2006. That’s when we closed the deal. And then the second company we bought was about a year and a half, almost exactly a year and a half later, so June of 2007.

Alex Bridgeman: Did you have an acquisition thesis in mind when you bought the business or did it open up as an opportunity for you kind of after the fact?

Moises Eilemberg:  No, we definitely had an acquisition thesis from the beginning, and the thesis was we bought a business that was in an okay sector that provided some stability and some recurring cash flow stream that was stable enough, but there were other areas that we could expand to that would be more attractive from a competitive and from a unit economics standpoint. And we really tried to approach it from that perspective. And so, all the acquisitions that we did subsequent to that were really focused on not just scale for the sake of scale, but really to morph the business into something that would be much more attractive for an eventual buyer.

Alex Bridgeman: So were those companies merged into Avadyne, or did they remain as separate entities and businesses during that time?

Moises Eilemberg:  Yeah, so that was definitely one of my lessons learned, I guess, as we get into more specifics. The benefits of consolidation and not so much consolidation in the sense of cost savings but consolidation in the sense of standardization, I feel like we delayed, and mostly because of my probably inexperience and the fear of having some tough conversations that you need to have when you’re integrating businesses about who’s going to do what and what are the roles and what roles are overlapping and maybe need to be repurposed or eliminated. Those are tough. Those are very, very hard. The easy part is doing the deal and doing the acquisition and working on the negotiations and the documents. That part’s easy. The hard part is once you, and hopefully even before you close the deal, to think through what the best way is to integrate the businesses. And we were too slow at making those decisions and having those hard conversations. And I think as a result, we had some significant inefficiencies for a while, but we eventually figured it out. And with the next acquisition, we were a little bit more deliberate about integration.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. So, what changed as that integration process went on to deal two, three, and four? Like for the fourth one, for example, how much different or what kind of changes did you make in that integration? Sounds like speed was one of them.

Moises Eilemberg:  Yeah, for sure. I think that speed and being deliberate in making decisions, making a decision that you’re 80% confident of quickly as opposed to 100% confidence but delaying six months. There’s tremendous value in the former. Because people don’t do well with uncertainty. And when you have companies that are coming together, there’s a bit of a time window where everybody knows, okay, things changed. And there’s sort of an expectation that things are, there’s going to be some changes coming, and it’s an opportunity to say, okay, we’re coming together, here’s all the opportunities to make our businesses even stronger together than separate, and because of that, here’s the things that are going to change and they’re going to be uncomfortable, and there’s going to be a lot of change that people need to adjust to. But you’ve contained that in a period of time and once you’re through that, you sort of, okay, this is a new normal and you get on and move forward. If you stretch out that period of uncertainty and say, well, we’re just going to leave things the way they are for now, I think people know that they’re not going to stay like that forever. And so it creates this uncertainty and it slows down. People are nervous. It just slows the process down. And a wise man- I had many mentors and still have many mentors that were incredibly helpful. And one of them – I don’t know how PG this podcast is – but one of the best pieces of advice was if you’re going to have to eat a crap sandwich, don’t nibble. It was a great piece of advice. And so, yeah, so speed, being more deliberate, being thoughtful in advance of roles and changes and then executing decisively was definitely something that I think we got better at over time. We were by no means perfect and for different reasons, but that was definitely one of the learnings.

Alex Bridgeman: I like that advice. Go quickly, don’t dilly dally around. Were there some things that were worth taking some time though to integrate or bring together?

Moises Eilemberg: I think so. There were, for example, some customer facing aspects that maybe it was better to take some time. But I think, overall, we probably would have sorted those out as we planned. And I think those can be addressed. I would say overall, in terms of taking time, I always focus on that initial period after becoming the CEO of a new business. I think that is, at least for me personally, that was probably the time to take things slow because what I- certainly in my case, this was true. I think for all of us to come to, or not all of us, but many of us who come to the search model with some experience and with some ideas, great ideas from our education and business school classes and other experiences, we probably could identify a list of 100 things that we want to change the moment we step into a new business. And my general advice and learning is that you can spend a lot of time trying to change 100 things, but really there’s only about three that really matter and really can move the needle. And it’s worth taking the time, before you just dive into changing 100 things, it’s really worth spending the time in figuring out which are the three that are really going to matter and move the needle because some of these companies can only take so much change in so little time. In my case, the company I bought had been around for 20 years and it was managed the exact same way for 20 years and wanting to change 100 things in the first 30 days would have been really tough on the team, on everyone. So anyway, I’m not really necessarily answering your question, but in terms of taking time, that’s when I would really take some time and I would figure out, like I said, where am I going to be able to move the needle the best or the most and really focus on those things as opposed to wanting to rearrange the desk positions and the office and things that ultimately aren’t going to matter very much.

Alex Bridgeman: So how do you find those three that matter out of the hundred? If I give you a list of a hundred things for some other acquisition, what questions would you ask to figure out which are the three to five or even fewer perhaps that actually matter?

Moises Eilemberg:  Well, I think the first thing is to take enough time and actually get deep in the business so that you have enough context in a short enough period of time to be able to identify them. I mean, there’s probably a few things that are common to a lot of different businesses, and chances are those are the ones that you’re going to identify. In my case, it was really important to me to immerse myself. What I mean by that is I went through the same training that new hires went through, and that’s literally where I started, and I did the frontline work for a few days just to really understand how everything worked, spent a lot of time with customers. And the few things that we identified I think were really important. Probably, again, I’m speaking mostly about the mistakes I made so that others hopefully don’t make them. But I had a laundry list of a lot of things. And ultimately, it became very clear that things like understand your unit economics, really understand what the unit economic looked like, what are the revenue components, what are the cost components, and how they differ between either different parts of your business or different customer populations. In our case, for example, and again, I’m going back to the very beginning of the business, these things changed over time, but it became very clear that we had, I don’t know, we probably had 200 customers, and 150 of them were creating 80% of the burden in the work and maybe less than 10% of the margin. So just honing in on things like that, that’s where you can say, okay, we’re spending all this time in these accounts. There’s probably other companies that, smaller companies that are much better fit. So let’s encourage those customers to go elsewhere and focus on the ones that really move the needle. And so, it’s things like that. I think another one that we identified over time is how do we prioritize our work internally? What I mean by that is we figured out that, putting aside the customers for a second, in terms of the workload that our company processes, and I can tell you a little bit more about the business in a minute, but basically, we figured out that of all the work that we had our operations team take on, on both extremes, there was sort of 20% that no matter how hard we worked, we weren’t going to change the outcome. And there was 20% that we didn’t really put any, need to put any effort into. And then there was 60% of the work in the middle that that’s where really we could, again, using a term I use often, we can really move the needle. And so we developed some predictive algorithms to help us better prioritize that work. And so, these are things that you can apply to a lot of different businesses. And I think those are the questions that always come to my mind in terms of how can I make this business better. It’s really about leverage. You find that a lot of times, these smaller companies spend a lot of time on a lot of things and not all of them are important.

Alex Bridgeman: When you were at, before XiltriX, were you looking around at similar healthcare service spaces like revenue cycle management for another CEO opportunity? Like both these companies are in healthcare. Is there a particular reason you like that space and industry?

Moises Eilemberg:  So, I would say you could classify them within healthcare, but they’re really very, very different businesses. Specifically, the business that we were in with Avadyne, now, Avadyne Health is the name that we eventually gave the consolidation of these four companies that we bought over time. And we were in the healthcare revenue cycle space. We serviced about 300, almost 300 hospitals, and we managed a lot of their patient-facing interactions as it relates to the patient financial experience. And so the landscape in that industry changed very dramatically during the time when we owned the business, including the enactment of Obamacare and very, very significant changes in our customer base in terms of their consolidation, huge consolidation within our customer base. The opportunities in that space and the value really shifted very dramatically over those 10 years from a lot of different companies, very fragmented, to really only the biggest service providers were the ones that won that game. And so we had to fight very hard and really drive our strategy towards becoming one of the large national service providers as opposed to a regional. That’s a long-winded way to say we exited at the right time. That became a very, very – it always was – but it became an incredibly competitive business where a number of larger service providers were fighting for market share with, likewise, larger customers that had a tremendous amount of buying power. So, that’s not necessarily a business that I wanted to get into again. Dealing with hospitals, for anybody who has to deal with hospitals, it’s very, very tough. They’re very large, highly bureaucratic organizations. And so, I was definitely looking at a number of different sectors, but not necessarily just healthcare. I was really looking for something where I can apply some of my experience and many of the same traditional search fund parameters that people focus on, something that’s highly recurring, revenue streams, and in my case, something that I could apply some of the lessons I learned to make a business more profitable, larger scale over time.

Alex Bridgeman: So, what’s the kind of state of the market for this equipment monitoring, this medical equipment monitoring and storage and all that? What’s the landscape like today as you see it?

Moises Eilemberg:  Yeah, so I would say it’s a very interesting confluence of developments that make this, in my opinion, a pretty attractive opportunity. The first one is that there is a very- the whole phenomenon of Internet of Things, the interconnectedness, the fact that the standards of communication between all kinds of devices are becoming more standardized. And so the ability to communicate with a lot of different devices that are produced by different manufacturers, that’s definitely a trend and a phenomenon that you’re seeing in all kinds of industries. Perhaps even more importantly, if you look at the, certainly the spend, but also the number of very important drugs that are being introduced in the market are increasingly biologics and not small molecule drugs. So you can think about it as the difference between a drug being delivered by tablets or pills and a drug being delivered via some biological drug that needs to be either infused or injected and almost always has very stringent conditions in which it needs to be maintained. Even in the area of vaccines, which is a huge area of development, obviously the COVID vaccine, all these vaccines generally have to be temperature controlled. And so, the shift towards needing to have more controlled environments where all of these biologics are manufactured, stored, transported, delivered is a very, very significant and very systemic force in the market. And whenever you have anything that is temperature controlled or where the ambient conditions need to be controlled, then you need something to control it, but you also need something to monitor it and make sure that those conditions are in fact what you expect them to be. And I could go on; there’s a lot of other areas within healthcare that are driving the need for more controlled condition environments. For example, there’s an explosion of biobanks where companies can store, whether it’s cell lines or tissues or for research for drug development. And so, there’s a lot of- a growing need for cryo storage where you’re storing cells and tissues in liquid nitrogen. So all of that needs monitoring. And then last but not least, it’s a market that is dominated or at least has been dominated in the past by some companies that are not terribly forward-looking and they’re not terribly good. And so it creates an opportunity for more innovative companies to come in and develop a larger presence in the market. So anyway, there’s a few other things, but I think those are kind of the main drivers.

Alex Bridgeman: And have you done any add-on acquisitions with XiltriX? Like, is there a fragmented market that gives you some M&A opportunities in?

Moises Eilemberg:  There’s a fragmented market. I would say that because what we do has a hardware component to it, when we get a new customer, we actually go, physically go on site, and we have to install our communication devices. We install sensors into freezers and fridges. And so, to integrate two companies in our space, it’s a whole other level of effort because we’ll have two different hardware platforms. So I think the benefits of consolidation in our space are probably less than in other spaces that don’t have the physical hardware component. And so because of that, we haven’t really been focused on it. And there’s really enough market opportunity out there for us in terms of organic growth that that’s not something where so far we’ve spent a lot of time.

Alex Bridgeman: I saw one of your customers is Eurofins. They’re a pretty interesting business. Do you have a pretty- you talked earlier about having a increasingly consolidated customer base at Avadyne. Is that the case with XiltriX, or is it a lot more fragmented and spread out?

Moises Eilemberg: So far, it’s very fragmented. I think because there’s so much innovation in the space, with some ups and downs, there’s a growing and steady stream of investment into new biotech startups. And every new biotech startup is a opportunity or has the need for environmental monitoring, maybe not every one, but many of them. And so, I think because of the tremendous amount of innovation, I don’t really foresee slowing down anytime soon. There’s all these companies being started all the time. And so, there’s a cycle of consolidation where you have large pharma buying innovative companies to fill their drug pipeline. But from the sort of the supply of businesses, I don’t see that slowing down anytime soon.

Alex Bridgeman: What’s driving the biologics explosion and growth over the last few years? You mentioned that’s a larger part of vaccines and materials that need to be stored. Why do you think that is? What’s behind that?

Moises Eilemberg:  Well, there’s been a tremendous amount of innovation and scientific breakthroughs in terms of starting with the sequencing of the human genome and the ability to identify different parts of or different genes that have different effects, the ability to, with some of these drugs, turn on and off some genes that may help cure diseases that were so far incurable. There’s a tremendous amount of very, very significant innovation in cures for all kinds of things. There’s cancers that used to be a death sentence just a few years ago, and now literally you can extend somebody’s life for a very long time. There is a tremendous amount of new knowledge about how our genes work and personalized medicine, the ability to take some of those genes, turn them on, turn them off. And it’s really exciting. And all of this results in, again, new cures for diseases that we’ve had and had been death sentences. And now we’re starting to figure out how to, if not cure them, at least live with them.

Alex Bridgeman: Coming back to XiltriX as a company that was started versus one you acquired, are there any- what about XiltriX did you set up or put in place that was driven by your experience at Avadyne? Like if a close friend of yours looked at 10 different random companies and saw XiltriX, what would make them say, ah, that’s the one that Moises runs because of these reasons or because it’s doing this or it has this team structure or something? Is there anything specific that you feel like you’ve brought specifically from your Avadyne experience to XiltriX?

Moises Eilemberg:  Yes, a few things, and there are also some things that we’re just scratching the surface on or really aren’t at the point yet where we’re fully taking advantage of some of the things that we can do. But so far, going back to the concept of unit economics, really understanding, and really when we started XiltriX, we had a thesis about what the unit economics would look like, but didn’t really know. And so we spent probably the first year and a half proving out those unit economics. And so, how much can we charge for this? How much does it cost for us to deliver the service both initially and then over time? Because obviously with, hopefully with scale, you can improve your unit economics. And so proving out, focusing on that and making sure, okay, if these are my unit economics, then if if I bring in more units, then eventually I will have- if my unit economics are solid and defensible and attractive and scalable, eventually I will have a great business. So being able to really focus on that from the very beginning has been really impactful. Another one I can think of is just how to organize a sales organization and how to equip them with the right tools to be able to start selling right away. And that’s everything from basically what I call a sales playbook. Who are our customers? Where are they located? How many of them are there in each industry vertical that we’re targeting? How do we prioritize them? How should we divide those prospective customers within our team? Is it by industry or by geography? What’s the messaging? What’s the value proposition that we’re selling and how do we reach them? And then from that, how to build a sales process, what are the steps of the sales process, how do we organize a funnel so that we can track our progress, what are the metrics? All of those things are things where I learned a lot of it from mentors but also trial and error and lessons learned on what worked and what didn’t. Compensation, sales compensation, that’s a huge one. Made lots of mistakes on that one that I was able to learn from. So yeah, those are two significant areas.

Alex Bridgeman: Any big mistakes on the sales comp side? I’m fascinated by great sales teams and learning how they work, and I’ve had a number of good sales driven CEOs or former CROs on the podcast, so that’s just an area I’m really curious about. I’d be curious what your experience with comp has been.

Moises Eilemberg:  Sure. So, I think the first one is, well, there’s tons of learnings, some of which I think are probably well-known but seldom actually effectively implemented. I mean, things like salespeople really do what you incentivize them to do. Having a sales comp plan that rewards one thing while expecting another is a recipe for disappointment. I think that happens sometimes because I’ll tell you specifically in my experience, when I took over my prior company, Avadyne, there was a sales comp plan that had been established 15-20 years before, and it’s very hard to change without some significant difficult conversations and pain and potentially some people leaving. And so there’s a tendency to want to do it gradually, and maybe there’s some merit to that. You don’t want to lose your entire sales team from one day to the next. But again, having a sales- in my specific experience, at that time, having a sales comp plan that rewarded customer retention completely and maybe even more or equally as new sales or growth was a recipe for making sure that my sales people were just focusing on keeping clients and not bringing in any new ones because keeping clients is easy. So those are the things that are really important to identify and fix deliberately and decisively because, again, you can’t reward one thing and hope for another. At least that hasn’t worked for me. The other one is the ability to create something that’s simple enough. I’ve seen comp plans for salespeople that are incredibly well thought out but very, very complex and very difficult to figure out how to actually move the needle and probably they were developed by some PhD in mathematics. But if you don’t have a comp plan that’s easy for the sales team to understand, track, and see direct results from their wins and positive results and direct negative results from their losses, then it’s not going to be very effective. So simplicity is another huge one. And you can get very, very sophisticated with a multivariable sales plan that rewards 15 different things. It just doesn’t work. It needs to be very simple, straightforward, and measurable and impactful. Those are two.

Alex Bridgeman: So what’s kind of a rough look at your sales structure or sales comp structure for XiltriX?

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. So for us, we focus on rewarding our sales team primarily for new sales growth. We don’t have any part of an incentive program that rewards, as opposed to the example that I gave you earlier, that rewards customer retention. We have a whole different team that’s focused on customer retention, and they get rewarded for it. But we want our sales people to be selling and to be growing the business and we reward that 100%. Also very simple, you sell this contract, this dollar amount and you get this percentage of the contract. If it’s a $10,000 ACV customer or a $50,000 ACV customer, this is the percentage that you get, and it’s very simple math and they get a check every month based on what they closed. So it’s very simple. It’s very straightforward. It’s easy to administer. They track it. They know it. They follow it. And it’s very results oriented. We also compensate based on actual revenue. So a lot of times, and one of the things that I’ve made a mistake in the past is rewarding or making a sales plan contingent on or based on bookings. And what you think, it depends on the industry, but what you think you are closing or the amount or the size of the deal when you sign the agreement may be very different from the size of the deal when you actually start invoicing the customer. And so, for us, making that calculation based on actual revenue is very important. So those are a few examples.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, the simple approach, I’ve certainly seen that the most often and it seems effective enough not to add too many layers of complexity to it.

Moises Eilemberg:  It’s very tempting to get very, very fancy with these programs, and I think the marginal value of getting really fancy quickly diminishes.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, I would agree with that. I want to touch on unit economics too a little bit because you mentioned that as a big core component for something you look to understand. What have been some of the levers you’ve been able to use to improve unit economics? So, if you have a unit economics of X today, what are some ways that you’ve been able to successfully grow that over time or improve it over time, I should say?

Moises Eilemberg:  So, going back to my Avadyne days, I alluded to this earlier in the conversation, but it probably wasn’t very clear. So let me go into a little bit more detail. So at Avadyne, our biggest business was helping hospitals communicate with their patients to make sure their patients, A, understood their financial obligation, had a good sense of why that financial obligation was calculated the way it was, and then facilitate the payment aspect of it. So basically, what we did all day is we would get all of these batches of accounts from a hospital sometimes on a daily basis. And we would generate the patient statements, and then we would talk to the patient. And nine out of ten times, the conversation was about the patient not understanding why their hospital was billing them what they were billing them and why the insurance was paying X and not Y. And so all of this created tremendous problems for hospitals because effectively if somebody doesn’t understand why they’re getting billed something, they’re not going to pay the bill. They’re going to want to talk to somebody. So, we did a lot of that education. And so, from an operations perspective, we received electronically on a daily basis tens of thousands of accounts. So, this was information that was translated into a patient statement that was sent out electronically to the patient, and then there was the follow-up or the inbound of, again, all the questions of why didn’t my insurance pay, et cetera, et cetera. In that process, we figured out that, again, of 100,000 accounts that we received today, there were 20,000 accounts that we didn’t really need to touch at all, other than making sure the patient received the statement, because the patient was not going to have any questions, it was pretty straightforward, and they were going to turn around and pay their invoice, and there was no need to do anything. There were 20,000 accounts that needed to be analyzed for financial assistance because the customer, the patient didn’t have the ability to pay or they had moved out of the country, or for whatever reason, it didn’t matter how much time we spent on them, those accounts were never going to be paid. And then there was the 60,000 accounts that if we really focused our effort on that, we could move the needle on the percentage of dollars that were going to be paid out of those 60,000 accounts. And figuring out ahead of time of those 100,000 accounts distributed at random, which ones were the 20,000 in this bucket and what was the 60,000 that remained that that’s where we needed to focus was tremendously valuable to our unit economics because we could take 100% of our effort and focus it on those middle accounts and have an outsized impact on those accounts. And because we were paid on a percentage basis of the cash that was collected, it had a direct impact on our unit economics. So that was the biggest- the biggest impact was figuring out where we are putting our effort and stop putting effort on the areas that had no result and putting it in areas where it didn’t really move the needle. And so, to do that, it’s a longer story, we hired a PhD in statistics from the University of Iowa to help us build a predictive model, and that took quite a while. But once we fine-tuned it, it really made a difference because what that allowed us to do was to get more aggressive on our pricing and keep our gross margins at the same level, and therefore we were able to compete nationally against some bigger players and gain market share. So it’s very effective. But that’s just one example that made all the difference.

Alex Bridgeman: That’s awesome. Moises, we’re at the end of our time, so thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing a little bit. Your business is super interesting, and I have a close friend who has a similar company, so I’ve enjoyed getting to learn more about sensor businesses in particular. But thank you for sharing a little bit of your time.

Moises Eilemberg:  Yeah, thank you for having me. I enjoyed it. I wish we had more time, but we’ll pick it up next time.

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