Heath Fletcher (00:13)
Hey there, welcome back to another episode of The Healthy Enterprise. If you're returning listener, thanks for joining us again. And if it's your first time, welcome. My guest today is Braden Pan. Braden has a history of working in the tech startup world.
And after his own experience facing extremely high medical bills and the stress that comes with that, he decided to start a company called Resolve. Resolve is on a mission to eliminate stressful medical bills for people. They help patients navigate complex medical bills and reduce or even eliminate the amounts they owe. So let's get started. Let's go talk to Brady.
Braden, welcome to this episode and thank you so much for agreeing to ⁓ come on and talk to me.
Braden Pan (01:00)
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Heath Fletcher (01:03)
Yeah, I've been sort of diving into the website and learning more about Resolve. But for listeners who don't know anything about you, maybe just introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about yourself, where you've been and about Resolve.
Braden Pan (01:19)
Yeah, so I'm Braden. I'm the CEO and founder of Resolve. We lower medical bills on behalf of patients. We like to say that an everyday medical bill shouldn't bankrupt an everyday American. So to date, we've helped thousands of people save over $55 million on their medical bills.
Heath Fletcher (01:36)
That's outstanding. Like that must be music to some people's ears because this is a problem, isn't it?
Braden Pan (01:44)
It is a massive, massive problem. Around one in three Americans deals with some sort of medical debt that they don't have a great way out of. The estimates for the total amount of medical debt vary. We know there's as much as $200 billion worth of medical debt on people's credit reports, but there's a lot of outstanding medical bills that either haven't yet been reported to credit or won't be reported to credit. And so some places estimate that there's as much as trillion dollars worth of outstanding medical debt that the American public is dealing with.
Heath Fletcher (02:15)
My God, that's incredible. And I read something about it's the number one reason for bankruptcy.
Braden Pan (02:20)
Yep. So the number one driver that tips people over the edge to have to declare bankruptcy, which is really unfortunate, right? Like you had a medical event, you need to get healthcare and that's going to cause you to have to go bankrupt. Yeah. Yeah.
Heath Fletcher (02:34)
So what made you come up with this? Did you have your own situation? Is this from personal experience?
Braden Pan (02:42)
Yeah, so yes, it is. As a really brief background, I've been in startup companies the vast majority of my professional career and most of the time on founding teams where I actually joined the company before we raised any funding, before we had any customers or any revenue. And so I dealt with a personal experience, ⁓ fighting a medical bill and kind of basically bashing my face against the brick wall for 12 months trying to get it solved. I got it solved, but it really just opened my eyes to how difficult this is, how opaque.
bureaucratic the system is and how it's almost designed to confuse people and force people to give up and pay. And then I did some research to see how much of a problem this is for Americans in general. And so it just seemed natural for me to say, okay, I'm going to go find a business to go and tackle this problem.
Heath Fletcher (03:28)
So you, you, you decided to start resolve. Was it called resolve from the beginning? Like give me a kind of go back to early days of when you started in, maybe some of the, some of the things you learned and your takeaways. And if you were to, ⁓ start again, or maybe if somebody else is in your same shoes, what you, any, when any advice you'd give along that.
Braden Pan (03:50)
⁓ tons of advice, but so trying to get a little bit into the founding story. So when I first really started diving into this problem, I started looking at what are the other solutions that are out there, right? And so there is an industry of medical billing advocates. The vast majority of them are individual consultants, essentially, where people will call them up, explain their problem, and they'll agree to work on their bill.
And so I called dozens and dozens of them to try to get an understanding of what was going on. I noticed that there were no real major players in the space and there was no general awareness amongst the American public that this, that these consultants actually existed. it made it seem, or I'm going to rephrase that a little bit, but it became obvious to me that there was an opportunity ⁓ there. So I actually ended up partnering with a consultant, helped her grow her business significantly and it gave me even more
⁓ confidence that this was something that I should go tackle. So then I went out, raised a very small pre-seed round of funding, launched the business. initially launched as a tech enabled services company. We very quickly got through revenue and got to cashflow, ⁓ breakeven and then cashflow positive, which was really, really helpful because it meant that I didn't need to take on significant additional funding, at least in the beginning to really figure out a lot that needed to happen on the operations side. Right? Like
Healthcare is extremely, extremely complex. One of the things that most of these consultants do is build out a custom plan for every single person who comes through, which is great for finding savings, but makes it really difficult to scale. And so we did this hundreds and hundreds of times before we started to notice the key patterns emerge that allowed us to build workloads and business processes to drive efficiency where we can find savings around 95 % of cases.
Heath Fletcher (05:41)
Right.
Braden Pan (05:43)
You also asked for some advice in, this. Here's what I'll say. I was a solar solo founder doing this. my biggest piece of advice is don't be a solo founder, right? It's extraordinarily hard. ⁓ even now, but it was even harder in the early days when so much had to be figured out. I had great, great employees who really helping me out, but at the same time, sort of the weight of the business, the weight of success and failure is on your shoulders.
your builders alone. And so that's a huge, huge emotional burden to bear. And I think if I had somebody else who was sharing that, that would have been extraordinarily helpful.
Heath Fletcher (06:22)
Yeah, yeah, agreed. Yeah, I would. I had that same experience myself. Yes, it's much nicer to have ⁓ you. You also get to share the load. You also get to share the victories. So it's a nice journey to have someone with you on that. Yeah, great advice. Yeah. OK, so where pick us back where you left off. were ⁓ you had just found some patterns and so that led you to, I would assume, some sort of.
automation process that
Braden Pan (06:52)
So we built out more automation ⁓ in this and we're continuing to use AI and build out automation to this day. But ⁓ the key inflection point that ended up happening is we started to struggle to really figure out how to grow rapidly. We're at above a million dollars in annual revenue, but because of the cashflow cycle for when we would actually acquire a customer, then we would actually get paid. And because...
our business model charges a percent of savings found. so cashflow is variable on a month over month basis. It it very hard to future plan and to really push ⁓ and or push money into growth. So we went out and raised a seed round of funding with the idea towards just doing just that, really pushing forward on growth and scaling our customer acquisition capability.
Heath Fletcher (07:40)
Right. And at what point did you bring in AI? Were you using AI from the beginning or did it come later?
Braden Pan (07:46)
so we certainly weren't using AI from the beginning, especially given the fact that in the beginning we were doing a lot of the processes by hand manually by hand just to make sure that we understood how to do them before we actually built out the automation. ⁓ AI came in relatively recently, right? Like the real advent of large language models or these foundational AI models that allow. Or I guess the layman to use AI and to do so without hundreds of thousands of data points is what two or three years old and so.
It was shortly after that that we started to incorporate AI because then we had the resources and the capability to do it. Whereas previously, we would have needed a lot more data points and a lot more internal expertise to effectively use AI or build AI into the product.
Heath Fletcher (08:31)
And so once you started using, I did that makeup. Was that a big shift for you guys?
Braden Pan (08:36)
It is and it continues to be a big shift and it helps us drive significant amount of automation in the product to the point where we're working towards this. We haven't released all of the features yet, but we eventually want to get to a point where we have a fully automated call it bill body, right? Where you can sign up, you can upload your bills. We can run the analysis, which you already do, but then we can not only determine what the path forward is, but then guide you through that path forward to actually find savings or do it.
So if there's an insurance appeal, write the insurance appeal automatically, have it automatically get sent to the right person, have AI drive the follow-ups to make sure things are moving through when there are questions from the insurance company. Take those questions and have AI handle them and respond to the questions automatically so that the patient gets everything done for them, which they already do with our existing concierge service, but in a fully productized way.
Heath Fletcher (09:34)
And how much does the participant, your client, how much do they have to be involved in this whole process? I mean, obviously they got to provide paperwork and things like that. What do they have to do or do you kind of just sort of take it and do everything?
Braden Pan (09:48)
So we do, like right now we do the vast majority of the work. There are two pieces, or the two things that we need involvement from a patient or a client. The first is to get the information from them, right? So the medical bills themselves, any healthcare records if necessary, sometimes there are financial documents that we need to gather in order to make our case. And so we need to get that from the patient. The second is in order to interact with hospitals and insurance companies, ⁓ the patient has to give us permission to do so.
And it's very simple for them to do it, but they essentially have to sign a form that allows us to interact with providers and payers on their.
Heath Fletcher (10:27)
Okay. So that sounds simple and simple enough. mean, so they hear about this, they think, oh, this is a way out of my situation. They, they jump in. Um, do you, is there, well, the money has to go somewhere. they're there here. You got this bill. Someone's got a $50,000 bill they're supposed to pay. Uh, that bill doesn't get paid or a large portion of it doesn't get paid, um, as a result of, uh, your services and your involvement. So what happened? So.
There must be somebody that doesn't get paid. is anybody not, not for this plan? I sort of opposes to you getting involved in this process because someone's not getting paid.
Braden Pan (11:07)
Yeah, so let's take a step back and sort of frame that a little bit more. You're actually right in that someone is theoretically not getting paid, right? So the hospital, let's say, is charging the patient $50,000, right? And so we are saving the patient money. There are three ways that we'll do that. The first is through an insurance appeal. If we feel that insurance improperly denied coverage of care for one reason or another, we'll run that appeal. In that instance, if that happens, the hospital is getting paid through the insurance company.
The second is negotiating with the hospital directly, where we get the hospital to accept a lower amount for the amount owed. Now, in that instance, let's just say we negotiate the bill down to 10,000. In that instance, there is that $40,000 gap that the hospital isn't getting paid. However, when you look at hospital collections rates, hospitals are collecting between 20 and 30 cents on the dollar from the patient portion of medical bills. So they're collecting 15,
or five to $10,000 at best. and ⁓ that number goes down significantly when bills go up. So for a $50,000 bill, it may be five cents on the dollar, right? So it also costs them five times as much to collect from a patient as it does from an insurance company. there's ton of money going after that. And they have these huge accounts payable books where they're, or accounts receivable, sorry, books where they're trying to collect from patients.
Heath Fletcher (12:26)
Thanks. ⁓
Braden Pan (12:34)
90, 120, 180, 300, even 360 days out, right? So the hospital isn't collecting a whole lot. They're spending a ton of money and they've got this really long accounts receivable. And so we're able to get them more than they otherwise would pay or collecting in a sense. It lowers their cost to collect because they no longer have to spend time and energy doing so. And we're helping them clear their accounts receivable balances. So smart hospitals actually really, really like working with us because they recognize that and are actually willing to work with us.
Heath Fletcher (12:48)
Okay.
Braden Pan (13:04)
The third way that we lower ⁓ patient portion of medical bills is through the application of hospital financial aid and ensuring that the hospital financial aid policy is applied appropriately. In that instance, yes, the hospital isn't collecting money, but they are shifting that to ⁓ a benefit to the community. then the vast majority of hospitals and all non-hospital nonprofit hospitals have financial aid and have financial aid requirements where they have to provide a certain benefit.
the community on an annual basis. And so we're able to help them get towards that as well.
Heath Fletcher (13:37)
Right. Interesting. And then, so is the rest of that just padding?
Braden Pan (13:42)
When you say padding, help me understand that. ⁓
Heath Fletcher (13:44)
mean,
is it just, is it inflated, you know, the, end price, is it somewhat inflated somewhere along the line in that mechanism where
Braden Pan (13:53)
but in a more confusing way than sort of a direct linear approach, right? So.
Heath Fletcher (14:00)
more confusing than this podcast will allow or
Braden Pan (14:03)
Let's step
back a little bit on hospital pricing and I'll try to go over it in a few minutes, right? So yeah, there is no set price for a procedure at a hospital, right? There's no menu.
Heath Fletcher (14:12)
You don't get a menu when you work, know,
hip replacement, you know.
Braden Pan (14:17)
Yeah,
I think there are you surgery centers that will do that, but that is not industry standard, right? Right. So there are essentially four buckets of pricing, right? So the first is what's known as the charge master rate. This is the list price that the hospital lists. These are massively inflated. They're anywhere from four to as much as 50 times hospital costs. And there's just no bearing in or basis in any type of reality for why the price is what it is. The second is the insurance negotiator.
So behind closed doors, hospitals and insurance companies will negotiate the rates that the insurance company will pay. There's all this court grading going on where the insurance company will say, I will pay $500 more for this procedure if you give me a $2,000 discount on this procedure. And they go back and forth and they come up with these numbers that are, until recently, nobody knew. Now they have to be published, but they're not newly published as well as they should be. The third bucket is the Medicare rate. That's what Medicare just says, hey, hospital, this is what we're going to pay you.
And that's the end of it. How that gets determined is a little more complex and not quite market based. And then the fourth is the cash pay rate, which is something that hospitals are now starting to adopt where they give a discount off the charge master for people who are purely cash paid. So you have these four buckets. They're all over the map on how much they're paying for different things. And from hospital to hospital, there's no
deal correlation like the insurance negotiated rate for a hip replacement on one hospital might be four times as much as another hospital that's just across town. Right. So there's a lot of variability there. And then the final thing that you want to look at is the hospital boss. What does it actually cost the hospital to provide ⁓ these procedures? Generally speaking, Medicare ⁓ rates are roughly what it costs the hospital or maybe a little bit less than what it what it costs the hospital. But insurance
rates are two, three, four times what it costs the hospital to actually provide the care and then charge master. So just massively inflated from there. When you say, okay, you know, where, where's the cushion there? A lot of that is because patients are either getting charged the bridge master rate, which is, you know, could be 50, what it costs the hospital or even the insurance rate. If there's an insurance negotiated price, which could still be four times what it costs the hospital. we can often, um,
get to a settled amount when we're negotiating, that's ill is more than what it costs the hospital to provide the service.
Heath Fletcher (16:50)
Amazing. I totally got it. And I told you great job just describing that because math is not my strong suit. So but I did you did I followed along. So awesome. Well done. Wow, like that must be so you must provide people with such relief like to to call someone up and say, Hey, you only have to pay 10,000 instead of 50. Like, I mean,
Braden Pan (16:51)
Hopefully that
Heath Fletcher (17:18)
I mean, that must for you must be where the reason you do it is just to kind of hear what that sounds like on the other end of the phone where they go, my God, thank you so much.
Braden Pan (17:28)
So I will say that I no longer make those calls. It's been quite a while since I've made those calls. We have a great team of people who A are better at finding savings on medical bills than I am. And B are also better at interacting with patients than I am. But I did it in the early days. And yes, for those people who do it, it is a huge reason why they continue to work on this job because there's a huge psychic benefit to being able to change the trajectory of someone's life. Like for most people who have these large bills,
Heath Fletcher (17:43)
Early days you probably did.
Braden Pan (17:58)
They can't pay anything like it's bankruptcy or something. Something along those lines is their only option. So you're saving them from that path of life, which is, which is super, super helpful. I have to be content with looking at the numbers, seeing our positive reviews online and just hearing stories from the people who work with resolve.
Heath Fletcher (18:20)
Right. Which you probably never get tired of either. that's, that's good. ⁓ the, okay. So let's talk about it. So you have, you have great story. The company has great stories to tell. So is that, do you leverage that as part of your sort of growth strategy and marketing approach? Do you kind of use those stories as a way to get the message out and so that people hear the kind of successes that you're having with, with.
Braden Pan (18:44)
Yeah, to an extent. And so there's two ways we do it. One, people leave us Google reviews and we have these phenomenal Google reviews and sometimes people go into real detail there. Two, we do have case studies where we've gotten permission from the patient to tell their story. Almost always we remove any personalized identifying information from that so that the patient can't be identified. But we can talk about the stories and what happened and what the results actually were.
Heath Fletcher (19:09)
Right. ⁓ so going back to what I said before, really about like push back from, from other people in the industry saying, ⁓ that Braden, he, he got all that bill taken down. You don't like him. He's, he's losing us money. Like, is there, is there that kind of animosity going on there? Or people are just like, ⁓ he found a way around it figured it out.
Braden Pan (19:29)
Yeah, so like that would be mostly from hospitals, right? Because we're we're lowering the amount that the hospital is collect or theoretically collecting and so I'll say there's sort of three buckets that I can put hospitals in. The first bucket is the more forward-thinking bucket and it's the one that I like which is what we described that hospitals are forward-thinking realize how difficult it is to collect from patients, how little they collect. Anyway,
They're also thinking about patient health and understanding and they understand that large medical bills create what's called financial toxicity for the patient where it actually significantly decreases health outcomes moving forward because patients will start to avoid actually getting treatment. And even if they do get treatment, they've got the stress from that treatment sitting there. And so you have higher mortality rates, lower outcomes, and it hurts the health of your population. So these forward thinking hospitals realize that.
and actually like working with us. The second bucket are the hospitals that don't think that this is a big enough piece of what's going on in their collections for them to not really care, right? Because while we've saved patients $55 million to ⁓ date and we're continuing to grow that, hospitals are collecting hundreds of millions of dollars from patients per month and there's dozens of hospitals. There is a very small bucket
of hospitals that actively gets frustrated ⁓ with us. And I think that that bucket is actually shrinking as we continue to work with hospitals, right? Yes, we're negotiating on behalf of the patient and we're representing the interest in the patients, but the ideal is essentially a win-win negotiation there where the hospital and the patient both come out better than if we hadn't reached an agreement.
Heath Fletcher (21:16)
And when they start seeing that benefit where you said earlier, they spend more time and money trying to collect the money than they actually get, that it makes it worth their while to partner with Resolve and say, okay, help us get the money, any money. yeah, and then the win-win is that the patient gets a lower bill, has a healthier outcome from their treatment and is actually saying nice things about the healthcare industry. ⁓
Braden Pan (21:45)
Yeah, absolutely.
Heath Fletcher (21:46)
instead
of always complaining about it, right? Interesting. Wow. Okay. So, ⁓ now where are you at now with Resolve? What's, what's the next step for you, ⁓ for the company? You've, you've actually, you've, you've been communicating directly to, patients who are in debt, but now you're, sounds like you're moving on to.
Braden Pan (22:08)
So
we launched directly going direct to consumer and we still have that arm and we'll continue to help patients who come to us. But what we're really looking at for expansion is B2B or B2B2C where we get channel partners and it's often ⁓ the end partners, either an employer or an organization where they want their employees or their members to have help with their medical bills. And so we've got a couple of different products set up to help that.
One is what we call easy file, ⁓ which is TurboTax for a hospital financial aid. Like as I've mentioned, almost every hospital has a financial aid program. There's two sections to it. The first section is purely income based, where if you are below a certain income threshold, you qualify for financial aid, which will either be a discount for a wife and your medical bills. And that income threshold is two to four times the federal poverty line, which means for a family of four,
If their income is under $124,000, it's under four times the federal poverty line, which means very often they will qualify for financial aid. So this is not like nothing. It's not just for the destitute. I think it's for the middle class. So there are three major reasons why a patient who should get financial aid won't actually qualify for financial aid. The first is that they're not aware that this exists or that it will apply to them. The second is they don't want to provide the information that the financial aid application is requiring because
In many instances, it feels like a financial colonoscopy and they don't trust the hospital not to just try to take all that money that they have. And then the third is just that the financial aid application process is confusing enough that the patient can't actually go through with it, right? Like a patient who's applying for financial aid is doing so because they have a big medical bill, which means they had a big medical event that required treatment. And so there's just a lot of baggage and emotional concern there that someone has to overcome in order to get through that. And so.
We've helped to solve that by building out something like TurboTax, except for financial aid. It's a very easy system where people one at a time just answer simple questions. We map that to the hospital financial aid form. We run our own internal analysis to ensure that the patient will qualify for financial aid before we submit that information over to the hospital. And then we manage the process for getting it through the, getting the patient qualified for financial aid. And so that software itself,
we're seeing interest from employers as a way for them to help ⁓ the majority of their rank and file employees lower their medical bills, especially as employers are looking to lower their healthcare costs, which means shifting ⁓ the health plans that they offer to more high deductible plans, which then shifts the burden onto the employee a little bit more. We can then help take that burden off the employee.
This is
Heath Fletcher (24:58)
You're right. This is complicated. Like, I mean, there's a lot to understand here. And so somebody trying to manage this on their own, it would be, you know, almost a lot.
Braden Pan (25:08)
You can do it and there are people who do it. But yeah, it's an enormous amount to do and that's why we exist and that's why people come to us because they want somebody else and they want experts to manage it for us.
Heath Fletcher (25:22)
Wow. Amazing. This is really cool. ⁓ okay. So let's talk about you and your role now. So founder, you started off, ⁓ it was a big job taking this on and you did it on your own. ⁓ now you've got a team of people. So tell me about where you are at, you know, as a founder and you're now, you're also the CEO. So, ⁓ what's your, what's your role like now? What, and what are your, what are kind of some of your challenges at this current stage?
Yeah, so.
Braden Pan (25:54)
⁓ you're right. When I first started the company as a solo founder, right? Like I had to do everything in the beginning and yeah, which is an enormous amount of work and getting pulled in all directions. And, know, we slowly hired great people to take over different segments of, ⁓ the business. Now, most of my time right now is focused on two key areas. The one is, ⁓ business development, that business development strategy shifting from just a pure direct consumer to more of a BDB B2B business.
Heath Fletcher (26:00)
Rehat.
Braden Pan (26:22)
building out the go-to-market strategy, interacting with businesses to figure out exactly what their pain points are and how we can solve it in the right way. And the second is on the product side, continue to drive the implementation of AI and automation in our processes so that we can lower ⁓ the cost to do this and provide better products for our consumers or our patients.
Heath Fletcher (26:46)
Right. Right. So that's, that's your focus right now. And where are you, uh, where are you seeing obstacles? Are you seeing any at the moment? Are you
Braden Pan (26:54)
It's obstacles, Like it's never free sailing, right? And it's just the size of the obstacle, right? And so like on the business development side, what I'm presenting makes a ton of sense, but when you go to a business, it's not just one person who has to get it and make a decision. There's a whole host of decision makers, many of whom have different priorities, goals, and objectives. And so you have to make sure that you craft your solution in a way that
helps every single one of those people involved in the decision making process hit a specific goal or objective. And so that just takes time. You forgot how to present and craft. That's it.
Heath Fletcher (27:31)
That's a good point because you need each one of those people who have a decision to make on a specific thing. They each have to see the light that you're trying to shine on this situation.
Braden Pan (27:42)
Yes. And the light can be a different light or different people. Like the person who runs HR, the light for what we're doing may be different than the CFO and the light because they have different focus areas and different major concerns. So you have to make sure that you're presenting things the right way so that everyone is getting board.
Heath Fletcher (28:02)
You're translating the same information multiple times to that's a task for sure. Right. ⁓ so, you've been, you've been actually, ⁓ marketing and, communicating directly with customers now. So how has that, your messaging and everything, how is that shifting now? Is that changing a little bit? you your friend facing and your, your website and everything?
Braden Pan (28:29)
You're talking about direct to consumer, correct?
Heath Fletcher (28:32)
Well, originally
you were directing consumer, but now you're kind of, you're kind of morphing.
Braden Pan (28:36)
Yeah, well, so we're going to continue having our direct consumer product and allowing consumers to go there. fact, actually, we had we had temporarily closed off the funnel for direct consumers. We focus on B2B, but that is reopening and our website should actually be shifting within the next week or so to reopen the for direct consumer. ⁓ The messaging for direct consumer has shifted over time as we've seen. It's not just a cost calculus, right?
Not everybody has a ton of money where $50,000 can be paid. They don't want to pay it. So $10,000 is a $40,000 difference. And there's $40,000 worth of benefits. The reality is the vast majority of people, not quite that, right? They can't pay $50,000. And so the alternative is to go back or something along those lines. And so it's more of an emotional thing where we're saying, okay, we're going to help you out. We're going to take this off your plate.
We're going to remove the stress there. So from the consumer perspective, we're continuing with that. But yes, there is sort of a shift in our messaging. The business is we have to talk more about the business value, whereas a business does think a little bit more in that pure numbers, cost benefit analysis. Now, there are pieces of business like HR that will think very much emotionally about their employees and say, but this is a massive benefit to employees and it's going to help them out. And so I want to help them out. But even then,
in order to get it through other parts of the decision-makers I was talking about, you need to quantify that. And so you talk about, okay, on average, businesses lose up to one week per year of productivity per employee from issues with medical bills. And that's not just the issues, the employees with medical bills.
Heath Fletcher (30:21)
Issues from medical bills. ⁓ wow.
Braden Pan (30:23)
Yeah. It's every like the average when you take the issues with medical bills and then spread that productivity loss across every employee, it's about one week of productivity loss per year. Right. And so it's sort of changing that messaging to that employees, employer.
Heath Fletcher (30:40)
They probably wouldn't even consider that that would require that much time.
Braden Pan (30:45)
Yeah,
well, so it's not just time taken off to solve it. There is absenteeism and presenteeism where an employee is just not as productive as they could be because they have the ongoing stress of a medical bill or any other financial event, frankly, ⁓ that's sitting there in the back of their minds. So they're not as able to be as present and as focused on their job.
Heath Fletcher (31:06)
Yeah, that's a great, that's a great, ⁓ was an interesting way to look at that. Yeah. Cause you can't, don't always think that way. You think, time off, mean time off for your procedure time off for recovery. But, but you know, if you're, if you're mentally emotionally incapacitated, you've checked out from work, you may be sitting in your desk, but you're actually not performing. So that's, that's very interesting. So that must be, yeah, that must be a ⁓ big trigger for HR. Yeah. I could see that.
Braden Pan (31:34)
Yeah.
Heath Fletcher (31:38)
So now what's the future look like? Where do you want to be? Okay, it's five years too long. Where do you want to be in three years? What do you want Resolve to look
Braden Pan (31:47)
mean,
I could say five years. Look, as a CEO, I always have these visions where, you know, I don't know if I want to say I bite off more than I can chew, but I want to get further than we may end up being. And so, but there are three things that I'd like to accomplish in years. Yeah. So the first is get that B2B customer acquisition flywheel going and going really well so that we've really forgot the value prop to go to market.
Heath Fletcher (32:02)
high. You aim high,
Braden Pan (32:14)
We're just getting employers and organizations on board to help their employees. And we're scaling the number of people and the amount of savings. The second is really building AI ⁓ more thoroughly into what we're doing. Like we're still working through that, but AI is not this just press a button and set it. And it solves all problems. There's a lot of work that needs to go into figuring this out, to building models, to training models, to integrating it. But I would love to have a fully AI driven process.
from soup to nuts or lowering medical bills. And then the third is actually expanding beyond medical debt to help consumers with all types of debt, right? Like there's at a minimum $200 billion worth of medical debt as much as a trillion, but credit card debt is about a trillion dollars worth of debt. Student loan debt is something like $1.2 trillion worth of debt. We don't actually know how much buy now pay later debt there is out there. It's not showing up on any credit reports. However,
We know it's lot because buy now pay later ⁓ companies are doing phenomenally well. And you have stuff like Uber Yeats or DoorDash is now offering buy now pay later for meals. Like it's just everywhere. And so all of this debt is we believe is going to come to a head and cause a, on a cliff and become a huge problem for consumers. And so we want to be the place that consumers can go to solve all of this debt and get out of sort of that debt trap and move on the path.
towards financial. Wow.
Heath Fletcher (33:46)
That is that is big audacious. Yeah, that's a big hairy audacious goal, but I love it is great. It's I've been down that path. I had a serious debt issue many years ago. It is it is astoundingly ⁓ crushing.
Braden Pan (34:02)
Yes, it's crushing in so many different ways. And that just makes it even harder to get out of it because you're crushing.
Heath Fletcher (34:09)
Yeah. And I was luckily enough to, uh, to find someone that does something similar many years ago, a nonprofit, Consolidate Consolidation Company. And you, the, the, yeah, the feeling that that provides to say, we'll help you. You got to stay, you got some work to do too. I had to be, you know, I had to commit to a certain timeframe, but you know, the, the, the feeling that comes from somebody is got your back and is helping you through this momentous.
situation, you can see the light at the end of the tunnel and that what you're doing is a really big thing for people.
Braden Pan (34:43)
And in turn for you, knowing you have that light and having that feeling makes it easier for you to go and earn the money. Yeah. Actually get yourself out of that and like just get you out of sort of that cycle that people get trapped in.
Heath Fletcher (34:49)
Exactly.
you have a motivation. Yes. You know, whereas before you're you've you've you've you kind of fall into this sort of state of being completely disinterested and and you there's nowhere to go. Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah, you're doing some amazing things for people out there.
Braden Pan (35:07)
100%. Yeah.
Heath Fletcher (35:15)
Let's talk about your, you as a leader, your leadership style. ⁓ What is it about you and the way you approach things that ⁓ motivates your team and keeps your team fired up?
Braden Pan (35:27)
I do want to say that how I lead has evolved significantly over time and significantly since founding this company, right? Like when I first founded the company and I was involved in every aspect, I wanted to push everything and make sure everything was done really, really well. So I had a really high bar for the work product and the standards that everybody put out, right? Which is good. And I still think you should have a high bar, but I probably pushed a little bit too hard. And so, you know, as
through self-reflection, through a lot of issues that we've had and the growing pains that we've had, I've sort of moved far more towards, ⁓ I guess you could call it visionary leadership, where I want to explain exactly what I had just explained to you on this is where we want to go. And this is the big goal that we're looking to accomplish. And this is how the work that you're doing helps us get towards that goal. And then allowing people then to solve the more individual problems within.
that work and sort of stepping back from that. And even stepping back when I look at that and say, look, that may not be the right way to solve the problem, or I don't think that's the right way, or I could probably solve it faster this way. Not always like pulling back from that, not always saying that and saying, you know, that's letting them go and solve the problems the way they want to solve the problems because it is more inspiring and motivating and create more productivity and better problem solving down the line.
Heath Fletcher (36:53)
Well, it's a good point. mean, leadership is an evolution for most people. I mean, you come out as a founder, you got everything's on your shoulders. You got your fingers in every pie. You micromanage everything and it's like, well, eight, none of that is sustainable. So you can't live your life like that. So at some point for your own sanity, a leader's got to step back and start handing out the trust cards and saying, look,
You deal with that and often, you know, talking to people is that founders that don't get past that, there are some founders or people that are leading companies that don't get past that stage of having to have their say in everything or everything has to cross their desk in order for anything else to move forward. ⁓ is where that's where things start to go sideways is because if you're dealing out trust to people and, and, and letting them do their jobs.
You'll net you as a leader can't evolve either, right?
Braden Pan (37:57)
Correct. I love what you said about trust card. I hadn't thought about it, but I think that's exactly what it is. Learning how to hand those trust cards out and just let things happen and allowing people to make decisions. Like you as a leader, you can't make every decision on the company. There's just not time. You end up holding stuff up and you end up demotivating people ⁓ so that they can't, they're not performing their best and they can't grow and become more productive.
Heath Fletcher (38:21)
Right. And part of that is letting them make decisions. Meaning they also have to be allowed to fail because they're going to screw up. You got to be.
Braden Pan (38:29)
Yeah. Well, you also
going to screw up. it like everybody is going to screw up? Yeah. But yes, you have to like resist that urge to say, no, I'm not going to let you fit. have to allow people to fail and provide sort of the environment so that they learn from their fails and failures.
Heath Fletcher (38:43)
Right. In an idealistic way, the failure is the failure is for all to benefit from in the sense that if you didn't do, if somebody didn't try something and it didn't break, you wouldn't know that that's not the way to do it. Let's try another way. Right. So that's the whole thing. Wow. Cool. Is there anything about the company or about your journey that we didn't touch on that you'd like to share? Is there any sort of, ⁓ you know, final comments to somebody who's maybe kind of
walking down your path, maybe somebody where they're at where you were 10 years ago and you have something that they should keep.
Braden Pan (39:22)
I'm going to go with two things to two pieces of advice to someone like that. So the first is something that I said earlier on. I'm going to reiterate is don't solo found, find somebody else to found with. It's so incredibly important. Yeah. That. I think I would have learned so much faster, made so much more progress, so much more quickly and save myself so much stress by doing that. The second is don't be afraid to take the leap either. Right. Like when I took the leap, there's a lot of stuff I didn't know. I had a lot of holes and
management leadership style in my capability set. I'm still not perfect. I still have a ton of stuff to learn. But when I reflect back on where I am, where I was then and where I am now, there's this huge gap of learning that happened. you're just, unless you take that leap and actually go and found stuff, you're not going to have that same level of learning at the same speed. And so don't be afraid to go and take that leap.
Heath Fletcher (40:14)
Right. ⁓ Talking about the finding a co-founder, ⁓ what kind of advice if you're looking for a co-founder, what would you suggest? ⁓ go, mean, our natural tendency is to go find someone just like ourselves, that we have something a lot in common with, or that we can get along with. But how would you do that? If you're going to find a co-founder today, what would you look for in that person?
Braden Pan (40:40)
Yeah,
that's a really good question. mean, the first thing to think about with a co-founder is realize that in a lot of ways, it's akin getting married. Like this is not an employee relationship where things don't work out. You can just quit and no real harm, no foul. Like you guys are getting into bed together for the foreseeable future. There is an enormous amount of emotional load. You're going to be sharing things with your co-founder that you may not be sharing with your spouse. And so you have to be prepared for that and feel comfortable enough.
And so like when people are saying, I want to get someone like myself fully understand that, ⁓ you know, there is an argument for getting set somebody with complimentary skill sets, which I fully see. ⁓ though I don't know if I would optimize for that. I think I would optimize for the relationship and the ability to work well with somebody and complimentary skill sets would be more of a secondary thing is if you're not able to work well with your co-founder, if you don't have the full trust, ⁓ and you can't.
interact with them like a co-founder, it's not going to work out and you're not going to save yourself. So you absolutely have to have that sort of that relationship or worrying about skill sets. Yeah. That's right. Yes. Ideally you get complimentary skill sets. So there isn't a whole lot of overlap. Yeah. Doesn't always happen if there is overlap in skill sets, but it's the right person go with that.
Heath Fletcher (42:00)
It's probably the communication part that's most important. you, someone that's going to communicate well, share well, not be afraid to tell you things you don't want to hear, having a hard conversation.
Braden Pan (42:15)
trust ⁓ judgment when they're saying that that you will absolutely you will sit down and listen to it versus continuing to bowl forward and say you're wrong
Heath Fletcher (42:22)
⁓
Yeah. next ⁓ we need to create a founder matchmaking program.
Braden Pan (42:32)
Which would be interesting. think I would love something like that. And I think it's really interesting. think the key thing, like, what is it? think my Combinator has something like that. I think the key thing though, again, is that you have to like, matchmaking isn't just making that connection. It's nurturing that connection and making sure that that like over time that grows to the point that two people are confident enough to work together.
Heath Fletcher (42:57)
Yeah. Awesome. This has been great. brain getting to know you, ⁓ and, learn more about you and your style as the CEO and founder of resolve and learning about resolve. I've written, ⁓ it's been amazing. So thank you for your time and joining me on this episode. we'll make sure that, ⁓ the website and everything is, ⁓ accessible to people on the podcast as well. So any final comments?
Braden Pan (43:26)
No, I really appreciate being here. This conversation was a ton of fun and I'm really excited and thank you for letting me come on.
Heath Fletcher (43:32)
All
right, we'll do it again sometime. Perfect. Thanks, Brad.
Okay, that was awesome. What an amazing story. Brain is really tackling something very big. The numbers alone, medical debt affects one in three Americans with an estimate of reaching up to a trillion dollars. The number one reason for bankruptcy in the United States is medical debt. The fact he's built this company, he is providing a huge service to people, patients that are in recovery, know, to avoid that overwhelming.
stress of debt. If anybody has ever been in debt for whatever reason, the overwhelming ⁓ feeling of that is crippling. So, you know, he's providing an incredible service. And for those of you who are somewhat in brain shoes, you know, founding a company, becoming a leader, the number one piece of advice he had to say was find a co-founder. Find someone you can connect with, communicate with.
share the journey, share the responsibility and build a business with somebody else. He doesn't recommend doing it on your own. And if you experience debt right now, medical bills particularly, or someone you know, please send them to resolvemedicalbills.com and they can get the support they need. Thank you very much for listening today and I hope you come back. We'll talk to you again soon. Stay healthy, take care.