Shontavia Johnson (00:00):

What’s up, y’all. Welcome to The Shontavia Show, where my goal is to help you start a business based on your life’s vision. This ain’t gonna be your daddy’s business advice. I’m laser focused on entrepreneurship in the 21st century, vision and breaking the traditional mold. If you can get with that, you can get with me, be sure to visit shontavia.com for more episodes, blog posts, and other content. Thank you for listening. The show starts now.

Shontavia Johnson (00:28):

Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Shontavia Show where I want to inspire you to build a brand, business, and life that you love, and I am so excited today, everyone to have Craig Walker here. Thank you so much, Craig, for being here today.

Craig Walker (00:43):

It’s my pleasure.

Shontavia Johnson (00:44):

I’m so, so excited. You guys are going to love this discussion. I’m going to read some of Craig’s bio, but I have to say, we could spend the entire time just talking about all of the amazing things you’ve done, Craig. Craig is the former founder and CEO of Vidistar and as CEO of Vidistar, he helped lead the company’s operations, business development, software development, regulatory affairs and strategic growth initiatives. Craig founded Vidistar in 2004 and his company was acquired in 2018 by Hitachi Healthcare Americas. And today Craig serves as General Manager of Hitachi Healthcare Americas, and Craig has done so many things in life before stepping into this current role. He has experience in the hospital administration industry, public policy, lobbying and government. Craig is from Texas, born and raised, born and raised, graduate, got his master’s degree in health administration from Texas State University, did his undergraduate degree at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. And Craig is the co-inventor or primary and venture on seven different patents. So welcome Craig. Thank you for being here.

Craig Walker (02:00):

It’s great to be here.

Shontavia Johnson (02:01):

Wow. What a background you have. This is amazing to just hear about all the things you’ve done and you’ve taken, it seems so many different paths in entrepreneurship and innovation. What has inspired you to do all these things?

Craig Walker (02:15):

Well, I actually, I have to attribute my grandfather always, he was a teacher and he always said, he said, son, when you look at life, be a sponge. And learn as much as you can and appreciate the knowledge that sometimes nature bestows on you and what you get out of school. He said, you know, you can learn almost as much as you can out in the real world as you could in the classroom. And I always thought that was pretty cool.

Shontavia Johnson (02:38):

So was your grandfather also a Texan?

Craig Walker (02:41):

He is. It was.

Shontavia Johnson (02:43):

So Texans, you grew up there. How did you get to South Carolina? How did you start this whole process? How did you grow up? How did it get you here?

Craig Walker (02:52):

That’s a great question. I was born in Houston. My dad actually he’s a surgeon and he trained under Dr. Debakey and Dr. Cooley. They were the principal inventors of the heart valve. And so he was from a rural town and he wanted to you know, have a practice. So we moved to Nacogdoches, Texas. That’s kind of in the deep heart of Pineywoods, but it’s basically not many people really, really understand it’s the oldest town in Texas, they always equate, it’s where the shuttle broke up and the pieces fell when the disaster, the Discover disaster occurred. So, but Nacogdoches was a great area for me to appreciate healthcare because we didn’t have a whole lot of healthcare providers. Population of about 30,000, and we have Stephen F. Austin State University there. So had an academic setting and by way of just kind of, you know, from there you know, I was fortunate enough to have a lot of interest. I had already graduated from Millsaps. I was studying to take the MCAT and went up to Georgetown to interview for my, for an MD PhD program in biomedical ethics and happened to run into a young lady who I ended up marrying — Bianca. And so I packed all my bags, went up there and courted her and needed to get a job. And so I ended up getting a job in the U.S. Senate for Lloyd Bentsen, you know, so that’s kinda how I got up there and how we met. And then we got married and moved to Austin. And it was interesting. You know, Austin at that time downtown was still relatively vacant. It’s kinda hard to imagine nowadays. But yeah, that’s really how we got got how I met her and how we moved back to Texas.

Shontavia Johnson (04:28):

Got it, got it. So how did you go from what you were doing in Austin to starting a company? How did all that come about — your journey as an entrepreneur?

Craig Walker (04:37):

You know, I was just very fortunate. I was working for, at the time, I was chief of staff to a fabulous woman by the name of Patricia Gray. She was probably the most powerful female legislator. And she represented Galveston, which had the University of Texas Medical Branch. UTMB were the founders, they’re actually in the Smithsonian for being the founders and being very innovative in telemedicine. And so I was fortunate to help pass a lot of law and legislation. And it helped me implement rules at the very onset of the telemedicine industry. And so I had exposure to where technology could help bridge and connect providers. And unfortunately for my wife and I, we had tried to have kids for about eight years. And luckily we finally had a pregnancy get to the first trimester and low and behold, if he doesn’t have some complications. And so I would take VCR tapes, remember those big old cassette tapes and I would literally send them by mail to a buddy of mine in Fort Worth. We had done a telemedicine program to try to reduce low birth weight amongst a medically underserved area of downtown Fort Worth. And so I knew he was an expert. I trusted him. And you know, in healthcare it’s all about trust. And I wanted to get his opinion about the gestational development of our hopefully future child. And so that whole process was very it was very emotional, Shontavia, because were getting advice that maybe our, our, our future child, cause we didn’t know the sex, was going to have issues with his kidneys. And so at the end of it all, after his birth, I remember looking at Dr. Massingill, that’s my friend in Fort Worth. I said, Sealy, isn’t there some way that you could just transmit this data from the ultrasound to a computer and check it out over the internet. And he said, no, nothing like that exists. And I thought, Hmm. I said, wow, maybe I can help find a way. And that was really the inspiration. It was very personal, very emotional. And I felt like there was a need.

Shontavia Johnson (06:29):

Wow. So what year was this?

Craig Walker (06:32):

Wowie, well our son was 2001. So from that point in 2001 until 2004 again, I was just happened to be at the right place at the right time. I was sitting next to some people that worked in various industries. I was the chairman of the American Telemedicine Association it’s the industry advisory board. And so I got a chance to meet with people from DARPA. You know, they did advanced the Defense Advanced Research Project Cisco, Intel. And it was, you know, and so when you’re around those kind of individuals you know, it was very inspiring. And so I put together a plan, came up with the idea and and just really went from there to building a company.

Shontavia Johnson (07:16):

So how do you go from idea to company? You have this idea, you have a plan. What do you do with that idea and that plan?

Craig Walker (07:23):

Well, you, first thing I did was document it. You know, I put it in, I had, you know, I went from like, you know, the old Starbucks idea on a coffee napkin to you know, putting it in a Powerpoint to where, you know, for me it was a, the timing was very ironic. I literally had just left a company where I was the vice president of a pharmacy software company to go into grad school. So I literally started this company my first year in graduate school. And so cause I remember going to the coffee shop and actually getting on the computer and downloading a CT image from Poland, you know, so just to see how it worked. And so what I did is I put together the idea and formalized it and then I started looking at where would be a cost effective way to get my development done. You know, cause at the time I didn’t really have much money hardly any money really. And so I wanted to understand, you know, what were my costs? The easiest thing that anybody can do really right off the bat is get it online to the secretary of state’s office and register their company. And that’s, that’s literally the first thing I did do. And then I you know, I went to friends and family to look at outside investment. You know, that’s typically kind of the first place you want to go. And then fortunately for, for me my wife and her family lived here in Greenville and I— out of just nowhere, a physician from Greenville called wanting to talk to me about telemedicine. And that led into him becoming an investor and his practice becoming the first customer.

Shontavia Johnson (08:57):

Oh wow. Okay.

Craig Walker (08:58):

So it just was really, and then, the state of South Carolina has a fabulous program through the South Carolina Research Authority called SC Launch. I understood that to qualify we had to be a South Carolina based company and so I decided to go ahead and sell the assets of my company in Austin, create a South Carolina company, which was called Vidistar. And you know, one thing led to another. We applied for funding through SC Launch and received a couple hundred thousand dollars in funding, which helped help us launch launch the company with sales.

Shontavia Johnson (09:29):

Wow. So you’re doing all this, you have a wife, a new baby, you’ve moved to a new city. Were there any difficult things about all of this? How did you navigate moving a whole company to a new state with you and I know you had family here, but did you have other professional connections beyond the person who reached out to you? How did that all come together for you?

Craig Walker (09:50):

Not really, I mean, for us it was it was kind of a leap of faith. I mean, I had already, I had gotten in at Tenet Healthcare Corporation’s leadership development program for CEOs. So we were in Houston. I’d already run some hospitals in Houston or help run some hospitals in Houston. We went to Lufkin, Texas where I was an executive. And so we, we kind of looked at it and thought, you know, we’d been in Texas 15 years, you know, let’s look at maybe spending some of that time in South Carolina while we got it. And so really the connections were that I actually wanted to run a hospital here in this state because I wanted to gain some really good experience in healthcare. And so the was the company at the time was kinda more it wasn’t a hobby for me, but one of the partners actually was my father in law was kind of managing it while I was really trying to learn more about the hospital side of the business because that’s, that was the market we really wanted to go after.

Shontavia Johnson (10:40):

Yeah. So that’s smart. So you used your professional career path to support these entrepreneurial endeavors.

Craig Walker (10:48):

That’s exactly right.

Shontavia Johnson (10:48):

So when did you decide I’ve learned enough about hospitals or learned some amount about hospitals so that I can do this full time? How did you make that transition?

Craig Walker (10:58):

It was the toughest decision in my life. I actually had contacted several individuals in this community in Greenville that were, I called them my “kitchen cabinet.” They were mentors. Individuals like John Warner and Tom Strange, who had already, you know, done something similar and, and it was through the advice of Tom that said, he said, Craig, this is never going to take off until you do it full time.

Shontavia Johnson (11:19):

Wow.

Craig Walker (11:19):

And it was scary because I thought I have to give it, I’m going to take us, you know, cut and pay. We’re not going to have any insurance, you know, this was before the benefits of Obamacare. And it was rather terrifying. And so I, after being here for almost a few years, I just finally took their advice and took the cataclysmic leap and ran it. And that was 2011.

Shontavia Johnson (11:42):

Wow. And so you said it was the most difficult decision you’ve ever made, and how did you kind of get through those early years where things are unpredictable? You mentioned, you had a new baby, no health insurance. Is it just the day to day? Every day is a leap of faith or…?

Craig Walker (12:00):

You know, yes. And no, I mean, I think you become the captain of your own destiny, you know, so you have to really understand that you’re going to be on the road a lot. Because not only are you the founder, the inventor, the CEO or president, but you’re also the number one sales person. And if you’re not that person, then you need to find somebody that is. Fortunately, I’ve always been kind of loquacious and charismatic. And while I hadn’t had a formal training in sales, to me it was like lobbying or any of these other things I’ve done in the past. And so I just kind of gravitated naturally. And so I literally drove all over the South, all over the state meeting people that were in cardiology, which was our specialty area in hospitals. And because I’d been in the hospital market and had run hospitals and worked with a lot of different providers, I understood where they were coming from. And so I was able to, to, to succeed in getting a lot of sales for the company. And so we grew, we grew the company actually almost exponentially year over year

Shontavia Johnson (13:02):

With you going out on the road and making, building those connections one at a time.

Craig Walker (13:07):

Yeah. It’s a lot of work. A lot of miles.

Shontavia Johnson (13:07):

It sounds like it. Gosh. So you mentioned your mentors. How do you find good mentors? Because they’ve given you advice to take this leap of faith, so you have to trust them too. How did you find mentors that you trusted who would give you great advice and that kind of thing?

Craig Walker (13:24):

God? That’s a great question. I think it was just, I think you, or at least my opinion is when you meet people, you sometimes formulate opinions quickly about who they are and the rest of the time you’re trying to convince yourself if you’re right with, with Tom and John, I met them through SC Launch, and I was, I was bold to go up to them and just, and really I was curious, you know, I was, I was like, Hey, we’re going to be presenting to you. Would you mind meeting with me and us to look at what we’re going to present and give us advice before we do it? You know, we want to do a good job. And through that process I saw in them interest in wanting to coach me and I was excited because I think sometimes in my professional development, the best advice I’ve ever gotten is really from the individuals I either worked for or I had exposure to that had been there. You know, and, and it’s sometimes the, the one question I always asked them– what would you do different? You know, and that stuff you can’t always get in a book, you know? So that’s how I found them. I literally we connected through that and through SCRA and SC Launch and we are still good friends today and I still go to them to seek outside advice, you know, whenever I feel compelled because I find, I find that they have a lot of acumen and wisdom.

Shontavia Johnson (14:50):

Yeah, no, that’s awesome. Yeah. So they give you this advice, you take the leap of faith, you’re driving up and down the Eastern seaboard, it sounds like. How do you get to the point where your company has grown as much as it has, that there’s interest from third parties and acquiring you? How does that happen?

Craig Walker (15:07):

Well, for us the market had changed a lot. After the recession, there was a lot of consolidation in the healthcare market, both for medical record companies, imaging companies. And what I realized was sobering, because at first I, I really wanted this to be a company I could just hand over to my son one day in the future. But the consolidation really grew disconcerting because I thought, we have a great product but we’re small. And we’re seeing a lot of the smaller companies either go extinct or get gobbled up and you know, everything in the market is like an inverted bell curve, you know? And so what you’re constantly trying to do with, you know, when the reason– and we can still, you know, pursued the innovation in the IP world, intellectual property world — is you want to push that bell curve further and further out, right? Constantly innovate, constant create new. So what you don’t want to do is sell the company when you’re starting to cascade on the other side of the bell curve, you want to hopefully sell it at the top, at the peak. And I felt like the market was such where at least in terms of capturing our best valuation for the company, the timing, whether we liked it or not was eminent. And so, you know, that’s really what compelled me. And part of it is just like I had been in the professional side of this — healthcare. I’d seen a lot of the products, I’d use them. I knew the competition and I felt like the timing was critical for us to seek a buyer and and try to, you know, try to sell the company in a way that works best for our customers and for our organization.

Shontavia Johnson (16:42):

So when you sell a company, do you just like put up a for sale sign and people reach out or…

Craig Walker (16:47):

You know, I wish it was that easy. It’s kind of like in many regards, selling a house to some extent. You know, you get a broker or you can get a broker. Not all, it doesn’t always happen this way, but I think the best methodologies employ this and that’s where you, you hire a firm that specializes in mergers and acquisitions and investment. And you know, because you could either, because we did look at growing organically, which we did for a long time. We also sought outside investment which, you know, they’re always going to want a big piece of your pie, you know, and they may replace me or management. And then we also then discussed, okay, well let’s look at–, you know, look at a buyer. And so we hired a group that had specialty in actually selling companies just like ours in radiology.

Craig Walker (17:35):

And so they were, you know, we were impressed with that acumen and their professionalism. And they, we hired them. They come in, they, they know a lot of the individuals at all these companies. And so they send out, you know, information about them. We used a group out of Boston called AGC Consultants and they did an incredible job. And over the course they help you make sure that your finances look good because you know, it’s a process, right? I mean, it’s not something normally you would just say, Hey, I want sell my company and do it tomorrow. We actually had been planning for two years to get our accounts in order. You know, we wanted to have financials that were audited. We wanted to have a lot of HR policies and procedures because we’re in healthcare, our products are FDA regulated. So we had, you know, we had to make sure our quality management system was good or at least we thought it was. And you know, things like that. So there’s a lot of foresight that sh—, you know, we used and going into this to make sure that we maximized our opportunity when we were looking at the valuation to sell.

Shontavia Johnson (18:44):

As I mentioned at the top of the podcast, you are the inventor or co-inventor on seven different patents. So if you have seven patents, I assume you had 700 ideas. So how do you decide what type of inventions warrant patent protection, what things will be important for the business or for what you’re trying to do? How do you—

Craig Walker (19:05):

You asked great questions. Well I think sometimes it’s, it’s understanding your market and because I was fortunate and blessed enough to be in healthcare, I understood the things that are directly related to the physicians getting paid. And so what we did is we came up with, you know, process patents, which are really hard to get nowadays in software. You know, back in when Clinton was president, you know, you could patent the internet, you know, but nowadays it’s, it’s very difficult. And so what we looked at is what are the key what’s the key innovation that we offer that helps our customers get paid by Medicare or by insurance companies and to us, you know, I had been involved in doing a lot of patent work prior to that and with other employers and I, you know, I looked at this process and I thought it was, it was novel at the time.

Craig Walker (19:54):

And what we really were able to do is everything that the physician comments on. And in the clinical report, we said, Hey, every one of those little words or, or values has like a unique identifier. That way we could do data extraction on it and nothing existed. We’d looked. That’s the nice thing about the internet. You can get on, you can go into the USPTO, you can type in some keywords. See what people have done. And at that time, nothing of that source had ever been conceived of. And so that’s what we, that’s what we invented. That’s what we patented. And that patent, I think it was actually John Warner, John Warner said, you know, your first patent you want that to be kind of your, your keystone, you know, where they are the foundational stone and everything around that, that you continue to file is associated with it. And so that literally was the strategy we used.

Shontavia Johnson (20:43):

So you create this great intellectual property portfolio, you create a sound business, you do all of these things right. But it sounds like building relationships was really critical for you, particularly early on. What else? What else was important as you started on this journey and continued on this journey? What things were critical?

Craig Walker (21:04):

I think for us it’s because we’re in healthcare, everything is predicated on trust and relationships. You know what I mean? You think about you know, the relationship a patient has with a physician it’s all predicated on trust, right? And confidence. And so we went out and whether it was to a fault or not, we made sure that our customers were always taken care of. Going into the acquisition, we had over 95% customer retention in like 10 years. Wow. It was really high, and we’d replaced or displaced a lot of the major competitors. So, you know, taking care of your customers and trying to, you’re going to make mistakes own up to them. And so if we made mistakes, we would say, hey, this is on us. Let us take care of it. And, and I think just being honest and taking care of them, they appreciated that and they maintained that relationship.

Shontavia Johnson (21:55):

That’s great. So what kind of mistakes, what kinds of things are you willing to share?

Craig Walker (21:58):

Well, in software it’s easy, you know, cause we were, you know, we weren’t huge. We only had about 20 some odd employees. You could, you know, develop something. And we didn’t have a really a dedicated quality assurance team at the time. And so you could literally, what we did is we used our tier one people for doing QA, which worked, which worked, you know what I mean? Everybody’s kind of multitasking. But you know, you could, you know, deploy a new version and something’s broken, you know, so you’d have to go back and fix it and then deploy it again, you know? And so things like that can happen. Yeah.

Shontavia Johnson (22:32):

So you mentioned you asked your mentors, what would they do differently? What would you do differently?

Craig Walker (22:38):

You know, I think knowing what I know now, I would continue to approach the business the same way. I think I would definitely have tried to explore more regional sales. We were mainly concentrated in the Southeast and South. You know, I think being able to have more presence, physical presence in other regions would have been neat, but, you know, but just, we were kind of organically growing. Yeah. You know, I also think I’m trying to approach more of the international business. We did get into Canada prior to the acquisition, which was cool. You know, Canadians are always so nice and they’re good to do business with and we were in some territories like Puerto Rico, but I, you know, I would have probably wanted to pursue more international business.

Shontavia Johnson (23:26):

Okay. And why is that?

Craig Walker (23:28):

Because there’s significant business opportunities there. Not everywhere. Some of these countries you have to be careful of because of the level of corruption while others, you know, it’s English can be, you know, is a, is a language that they’ll use in the professional segment and it’s easy cost of, you know, the transfer of getting into that market. The cost may be relatively low.

Shontavia Johnson (23:51):

Yeah. No that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So final question, what advice would you give to some kid who’s got a dream? An idea, doesn’t really know where to start. What is the hustle where should they start? What are the types of things they should be thinking about today?

Craig Walker (24:08):

Well, I think it’s, the first thing I would ask is what is the, what is the idea? What is the idea addressing in the market? What is the market and what is kind of the problem it’s helping solve. And if it’s one of these things that, one of these ideas that helps you know, it has it kind of a utilitarian aspect or if it’s financial, whatever it is, then identify that, write it out to where, here’s the business proposition for that. Here’s the value proposition for that idea. And then either to determine if it needs to be protected or if it’s something they want to take to market. And once they, and how do they want to take it to market? Do they want to be the one selling it? So do they want to create a company around it or do they want to license another company?

Craig Walker (24:55):

So begin with the end in mind, but also look specifically what is, you know, what do you believe you want to do with this? Because I think too often entrepreneurs come at this and they’re like, Oh, I’ve got a great, I’ve got a solution to a problem nobody knows they have, you know, and then they put all of their investments into it and it fails. You know, out of a hundred company ideas or a hundred a hundred startups, you know, 99 fail, you know, so to look at this pragmatically would be the first advice I’d give them. You know, and then secondly, if they really want it to succeed, they need to be all in. Doesn’t mean they need to be the salesperson. Not everybody’s a salesperson doesn’t need to be that they need to play lawyer, but look at the role that they can serve and then make sure they get the right people and let them do their job.

Shontavia Johnson (25:44):

Great advice. Thank you so much for being here, Craig. This has been fun.

Craig Walker (25:49):

This has been a lot of fun.

Shontavia Johnson (25:50):

So I suppose I should also ask and feel free to decline to answer Craig, but if people want to connect with you, if people have questions, if people want to see more about Vidistar or what you’ve created, are there places online where they can find you?

Craig Walker (26:05):

Absolutely. I mean, they can contact me currently at Hitatchi. Walkerc@Hitachihealthcare.Com.

Shontavia Johnson (26:12):

Alright, awesome. Thank you so much. So hopefully this conversation has been as amazing for you as it has been for me. I am going to take some notes after this conversation about ways to think about my own brand, my own business, and how I can be of service to other people. Feel free to reach out to me if you have other questions about what Craig has mentioned or anything else revolving around brands, businesses, and creating those things that support the life that you want to lead. You can find me at shontavia.com Thanks for listening.

Shontavia Johnson (26:45):

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Shontavia Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like, subscribe and leave a comment wherever you’re listening. You can find me on social media everywhere, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and wherever else @ShontaviaJEsq. You can also visit me at shontavia.com to find a transcript of this episode along with other show notes. While you’re there, please be sure to subscribe to my email newsletter.

Shontavia Johnson (27:16):

The information shared in this podcast and through my other platforms is designed to educate you about business and entrepreneurship and I love to do this work. While I am a lawyer, though, the information I provide is not legal advice and does not create or constitute an attorney client relationship.

Shontavia Johnson (27:34):

The Shontavia Show is a LVRG Incorporated original. The show is recorded on site in South Carolina and produced at Sit N Spin Studio in Greenville, South Carolina. Original music and sound design is by Matt Morgan and Daniel Gregory. Mixing and mastering is by Daniel Gregory and the video is by GVL Media.