Entreprener Runner-Up: John Williams

Entreprener Runner-Up: John Williams

President of Gould & Lamb Healthcare Consultants LLC

At first it's only natural to wonder if nepotism factored into placing John Williams at the head of the Bradenton-based Gould & Lamb Healthcare Consultants LLC. After all, he's only 29, and his parents founded the company.

How much life experience or work talent could a 29-year-old with no college degree have amassed?

Williams has faced prejudice over his age from business peers much of his adult life, and he has risen to the challenge each time. He has accomplished goals that would make a seasoned entrepreneur in the medical-services industry proud.

In fact, it is somewhat ironic that with Gould & Lamb, Williams is cutting his teeth in an industry many times his junior - a field that if projections prove true, is ripe for even more aggressive growth.

Growing up in Chicago, Williams never intended to follow his mother, Janice Gould (nee Williams), into the health care field.

"My parents had suggested mechanical engineering," he says. "They said I was really good at numbers and that it was a good high-demand skill that paid well."

But it took only an internship after his junior year at the University of Illinois-Chicago for Williams to realize mechanical engineering wasn't his forte.

"There was no interaction with human beings," Williams says. "It was just sitting in front of computers. The internship involved designing the duct system for a building; it was all numbers and formula driven. It was not exciting work."

So in 1996, he dropped out of college and took a job his mother had arranged for him at CorVel Corp., a company that reviewed medical bills for insurance companies.

Williams started at a low-level position and learned the basics of medical-bill review and coding. Two years later, he joined a similar health-care, cost-control company Concentra Managed Care Inc. Within six months he was promoted to supervisor. From there, he joined GENEX Services Inc. as a manager of about 40 people.

At 24, Williams was hired by HNC Insurance Solutions to run its St. Louis operation as director of medical-review services. The job came with a tight deadline and a tough requirement: turn around the operation in six weeks or HNC would lose a $50 million contract with its sole client/insurance company, Fireman's Fund Insurance Co.

"It was a job that nobody wanted," Williams says. "When I arrived they had a backlog of 145,000 (medical bills). It was pretty easy to see where the problems were. There were a lot of staffing problems. The company was operating with only 80 employees, about 40 employees less than it needed."

And there were problems with the existing employee pool, Williams says. About 80% of the employees were temporary, and on top of that 75% came from the welfare-to-work reform program.

"It was a mixed group," he says. "Some of the people were trying to change; but there were others that were stuck in (poverty)."

Williams eliminated half the staff and hired 80 more people.

Aside from the complexity of firing and hiring, Williams also had to deal with the obvious age difference.

"I was dealing with people that had more years in the business than I had years on the planet," Williams says. "All I could do was show them respect and listen to their criticism. You don't take the credit for others. The only way you stop that type of criticism is to show them your skill and ability. You have to know your stuff."

Williams met his six-week deadline. HNC kept its contract, and the St. Louis branch survived.

Meanwhile, in 1998, his mother and stepfather, Mike Gould, relocated from Chicago to Sarasota to work for Zenith Insurance. Shortly after they arrived, they lost their jobs. They invested $12,000 of their retirement fund to start a life-care planning business called Gould & Lamb, which targeted the medical and insurance industry. The small consulting company made a profit of $80,000 in 1999, it first full year.

In July of 2001, Williams received an intriguing job offer in a call from his parents. That same month, Medicare had announced strict enforcement of the Medicare Secondary Payer Statutes for workers' compensation insurers. It was a change with significant financial and legal implications for the insurance industry.

Up to that point, an insurance company could settle a claim with a claimant for any amount; if over the lifetime of the claimant, he/she couldn't afford medical treatment - even if it was for the injury cited in the settlement - Medicare (taxpayers) would pick up the bill. The new policy said workers' compensation insurers must get approval from Medicare in certain situations to ensure the settlement must cover the lifetime medical expense of the injury.

For at least three consultancy companies - Sagrillo Hammond & Dineen, LLC of Denver, Health Advocates Inc. of Tampa and the five-person Gould & Lamb of Bradenton - this created a scramble to provide go-between independent approval of medical and financial decisions in worker's comp cases between the insurers and Medicare. All the companies knew the risks to the insurer were huge and would eventually translate into consulting work, but the opportunity window for landing the bigger insurers and the biggest market share was limited.

Williams would sell those insurance firms on Gould & Lamb.

"It was a tough sell at first," he says, "but Mike said, 'Just keep calling them, and it'll happen. Know all you can about the industry and be their resource.' "

At the end of the first year, Gould & Lamb was in third place and had grown slightly - through some last-minute sales - to $400,000. Then in 2002, it seemed to click into place. The company landed big name after big name. Revenue quadrupled that year to $2.15 million and tripled again the following year to $6.4 million.

Now the company is the preferred vendor for 21 of the top 25 worker's comp insurers company in the nation including: AIG, Liberty Mutual, St. Paul Travelers and The Hartford, Williams says.

Since 2002, Williams has split his time between sales and operations/management, primarily focused on guiding the sharp increase in employees from 20 in 2002 to about 60 at the end of 2003. In the middle of 2003, Gould & Lamb became the largest Medicare-set-aside company both in revenue and clients; and Williams became president of the company.

Williams' parents Michael and Janice Gould semi-retired. Williams says Gould & Lamb grew 100% through selling additional client insurers on its services.

"Insurer volume is typically pretty fixed ... so all of our growth has had to come organically," Williams says. "We have put satellite sales offices in a number of major markets such as Boston and Atlanta to capture those clients, and we are expanding exponentially."

The company is in 12 cities and will be in 24 before year's end.

Most of Williams' focus now is on increasing staffing and computer technology to accommodate sales growth.

"We were lucky, even as a startup Mike decided to set up a paperless system," Williams says. "We have upgraded our computer systems and phone systems to handle the growth of that information. We just got a new server that should be able to handle all our information even if we grow by 10 times our current size."

The company, with about 152 employees, is looking to add 50 employees by year's end. Williams currently has a six-person team working full time on employee training, but he says it's still a challenge to forecast growth given a three- to six-month education and experience threshold for new employees.

Further fueling Williams' need to grow the company is the question of when the next group of insurers will follow under Medicare's more exacting rules for secondary payment.

"If you think about automobile, product liability and medical malpractice (claims) they create the same extra burden for Medicare as workers' comp," Williams says. "We are expecting a big change in the federal regulations for these industries in the next 12 to 24 months. Automobile alone is going to be huge piece. We figure that there are at least six to eight times the number of claims (over workers' comp)."

COMPANY STATS

Employees: 2003: 70;

2004: 140; 2005: 155.

Revenue: 2002: $2.15 million; 2003: $6.4 million; 2004: $11.96 million.

Average annual

growth: 142%