Will Wright
Will Wright
(Roy S. Johnson)
All he wanted to do was talk. He was a well-respected, well-paid engagement manager at McKinsey & Company in New York, the nation's leading consulting firm. But Will Wright needed to talk.
He needed to talk about the 20 pounds he had gained, the depression he felt every day and the excruciating pain piercing through his back.
He needed to talk about the loneliness.
He needed to talk about the heavy, heavy toll being exacted from him.
But even simply getting to the therapist, riding the subway or taking a taxi into the bowels of lower Manhattan, only added to the tool.
"By the time you show up," he said, "you're even more stressed."
Health care expert
Wright was an expert in the byzantine, ever-changing world of health care, where costs have been rising faster than inflation since the mid-60s. (He considered pursuing a doctorate in neuroscience, but never "pulled the trigger.")
At McKinsey, he traveled almost constantly, dissecting gigabytes of claims data to help insurance companies mitigate risk and squeeze more profits from the highly competitive health-care field.
He was good at it, too, though, then only in his early 30s, Wright was paying dearly for success.
"The biggest problem is the feeling of isolation you get when you don't buy into what you're doing or the culture, and you don't have a healthy outlet to talk about it," he said.
Growing up in the canyons of Southern California, where his father was a professor of astrophysics at UCLA, Wright says he developed a "holistic idea of what is health and well-being." He played football was an All-American at lacrosse--also the captain of both teams--and while attending Harvard he ran the Tae Kwon Do team and says he was probably good enough to "ride the bench for a couple of years" in lacrosse and football.
But between the trains, planes and chauffeured sedans comprising his life at McKinsey, he had little time to work out or play any sports, and he rarely got a good night's sleep.
Wright was, in a sense, a victim of the world in which he seemingly thrived--experiencing effects felt by thousands of highly stressed, yet unfulfilled people nationwide. For them, the pressures of success not only tip the scale away from a "balanced lifestyle" but crushed it to pieces.
Oh, McKinsey did much to help Wright, as it does for all its executives. It provided a suite of executive-health options, including checkups and tests at some of the finest medical facilities in the nation. One day, Wright found himself surrounded by men like him and experienced the proverbial life-changing epiphany.
"I was in an industry where many men retire at 50, and while they're working the stress holds them together, but when they stop," he said, "then they have a heart attack. The realization of that was my wake-up call."
The big risk
On the warm Spring Birmingham day we met, Wright, now 35, chuckled about the irony of trading one type of stress for another, and how they're intricately--and, yes, holistically--linked.
He's co-founder and CEO of a startup. Launching a new company is one of the most stressful things anyone could do, but in just four years, Pack Health, a health-care firm, has become one of the city's fastest-growing companies--rising from just nine employees at the end of 2014 to likely more than 40 by the end of 2017, and generating more than $2 million in revenues this year.
Stressful? Sure, but calls it an "easier" stress. "I work less and get more sleep," he said. "It's all about priorities."
In New York, Wright eventually realized his priorities were all but killing him. So, in May 2013, he quit that high-powered, high-stress gig, loaded he and his wife's belongings into a car and headed south--to Birmingham, where his wife had landed a job with Southern Living.
Wright, though, had no job, and no idea what he was going to do.
While some might consider such a move a significant risk, Wright said the real risk would have been staying put. In business, it would be called assessing the "opportunity cost." The opportunities afforded him at McKinsey were tremendous, but so was the cost.
"I didn't realize the vise it put on my life," he said. "The days and months I weathered trying to figure things out. That can put a lot of pressure on your life."
So, here's the irony: Pack Health, which Wright and co-founder Mazi Rasulnia launched in 2014, provides one-on-one counseling--via email, telephone, texting--to people dealing with chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, cancer and other health challenges, like obesity.
In other words, it gives them someone to talk to.
Filling the health care gap
Wright sees it as filling the gap between doctors and insurance companies by educating members about their care and guiding them through some of their daily challenges in a way their physician simply can't.
"Doctors have to see twenty to 30 members a day," he said. "It's nearly impossible for them to truly spend time and empathize with people and dig deeper into their worries. We can slow things down for them and have a positive impact on their progress."
Wright and Rasulnia, who had come to Birmingham to earn a Ph.D. at UAB, realized there was a need. "Forty percent of the population is struggling with something," Wright said. "One million people in Alabama alone are obese."
Identifying a need is one thing. Knowing whether there is a market--read: customers--ready to pay for that need is altogether different, and like almost any new entrepreneur, the co-founders weren't quite sure.
Any concerns were soon alleviated, following an appearance on ABC 3340's morning show, "Talk of Alabama". While on the air, the two men offered their service free to the first 50 who requested it. They were gone in four minutes.
"We're touching people so they feel they're not struggling alone, and not being heard," he said.
Pack Health members come from every state
Members are now being referred by doctors, insurance companies, employers, social and other media, as well as from partners such as WebMD and The National Psoriasis Foundation. Locally, Pack Health has a pilot program BlueCross BlueShield of Alabama and partnerships with American Family Care and Shipt.
Pack Health initially provides members with a small kit containing tools that allow them to track their daily habits (diary), exercise (stretch bands), as well as a refrigerator magnet-reminder and motivational guide. "Behavior-changing tools," Wright calls them.
Then members are assigned a health advisor who aims to connect with them five times each week.
The primary aim is to educate (alerting people to the goals and effects of each of their drugs, which may have been subscribed to them by different doctors) and change a patient's behavior towards a healthier lifestyle. Success, Wright says, "is a function of motivation, ability and personal triggers. There's no silver bullet that works best for everyone. But we've found that personal conversations help people discover what they need to better manage their illness or reach their goals."
Serious growth
Pack Health enrolled its 1000th patient in June of 2015, and by September that number had grown to 1,500. By December of last year, the company had 4,000 members. With a 30% annual growth rate, Wright expects to be serving more than 5,000 members by the end of this year.
Wright says the company has helped members, who average about 56 years of age (and trending downward as new members enroll), lose nearly 4,000 pounds, which is especially vital for people suffering from diabetes. He calculates that the service has also added 1.17 "quality-adjusted years" to every patient's life.
Wright says he's working with insurance companies, employers, and other funding sources to minimize the cost to members.
"We can talk a lot about 'patient-centered care' but we are actually just helping people with what they need," Wright said. "It's not exactly the Uber model, but this should be an uber-issue in healthcare: if you push the right button, complex things happen simply, magically, beautifully. Mostly, the industry makes care too complicated, overthinks it."
Pack Health's headquarters sits in a nondescript building not far from Lakeview. It once contained a bank that went under and abandoned the facility. "There were dead chickens stuck in the drains," Wright recalled.
Now, the building is filled with cubicles buzzing with health advisors communicating with members. Wright learned early that his health advisors didn't need to be certified medical practitioners. "We look for people with health-related degrees, like social work and nutrition, Wright said. "But most of all they need to be empathetic, the type of people who want to engage with folks. That opens you to a universe of people you can hire."
One of Pack Health's first employees, in fact, had been selling eyeglasses. She was also a cancer survivor.
Wright wants to dispel the widely-disseminated belief that finding capable people to fill jobs in this city is difficult, if not impossible.
"People think no talent in Birmingham, that's BS," he said. "I've met a lot of smart people willing to step up and lean in."
Even beyond the challenges of launching and growing Pack Health, Wright has not been totally able to elude the stresses of life. Now divorced with shared custody of a 2 1/2-year-old daughter, he often must handle the pressures (and pleasures, of course) of parenting--only now with the faith that he is better equipped to handle them.
"Honesty cuts through things," he said. "We have a tendency not to put ourselves first, but we simply can't be a good person and can't be there for our families if we don't put ourselves first."