Who the Health is ProspHire

Chris Miladinovich: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the first episode of ProspHire’s Soaring to New Health podcast. We’re super excited and hope you’ll tune in and listen to us in all the episodes. We have some really great programming ahead. This episode is all about who the health is ProspHire. I’m Chris Miladinovich. I’m a co-founder and I’m the COO of ProspHire. In every episode, I’ll be sharing the hosting chair with Dan Crogan, our first principal and senior vice president of consulting.

Dan Crogan: I’m excited to get this thing started.

Chris Miladinovich: All right. Well, let’s introduce a really very, very, very special guest today. Before we get into too much trouble, our fearless leader, co-founder, ProspHire and CEO of ProspHire, Lauren Miladinovich.

Dan Crogan: And your better half.

Chris Miladinovich: My wife. Thanks, Dan.

Lauren Miladinovich: Thanks, Dan. You probably should’ve led with that.

Chris Miladinovich: Ugh. She’s in charge of me at work and at home. How could I forget? But it turns out we’re pretty good together. But I know everyone wants to know how this journey with ProspHire really started and it began with a napkin. Isn’t that right, Lauren?

Lauren Miladinovich: That’s right. Chris and I started ProspHire in 2015 with an idea on a napkin in our basement. The construct of that first deal is still hanging on the wall and the sixth floor of our Pittsburgh Power Building today. Within a year, we opened our first office space in the North Shore of downtown Pittsburgh. By year three, we had announced the focus entirely on healthcare, our official certification as a woman-owned business, and the expansion of our new headquarters in the Pittsburgh Power Building in downtown Pittsburgh.

Dan Crogan: It’s incredible, and it’s coming up on eight years now. We’re going to be eight here soon, Dan.

Lauren Miladinovich: So when we were approaching our five-year anniversary, we were excited. We’re like, we’re doing awesome, it’s going to be five years, you know, we’re going to make it. And then March of 2020 came and the entire world shut down for a global pandemic. Our five-year anniversary was April 2nd, 2020. So that was very, very scary times, very challenging times, as everybody knows and everybody that went through. There’s no playbook for a pandemic. We had no idea if we were going to even have a business at the end of it, after all of the successes that we had, all of the challenges we had overcome. We were very fortunate to have an incredible leadership team, and we just all buckled down. We all worked together. As a small, smaller Firm, we’re able to be very agile. So I’m proud of this team and I’m proud of how we made it through the pandemic and not only did we make it through, we grew.

Dan Crogan: What about you, Chris? What about some major milestones, some major key activities that have stuck out in your mind?

Chris Miladinovich: Some of my favorite days are our Prosper Together days. And when we’re doing events that interact and engage with the community. As I’m sure people have read, we do a lot of work with the Boys and Girls Club. That’s always a fun day, especially for me. I really enjoy it. I like how working with that organization to help them for a full day. And the whole Firm participates. I think everybody’s really excited about it. And then this year having two offices for the first time getting back into the community after COVID, having an impact in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. That’s really cool. The true real reason why one of my favorite days of Prosper Together Day is because it incorporates our loving pet pig, Nola. Which is a really interesting story how we got involved with that. Lauren, you tell that one best.

Lauren Miladinovich: Yeah, who would have thought that our connection to a charity would be through a pig? Back in 2015, the Boys and Girls Club reached out to us on our pet pig Nola’s Facebook page. And they had been following our story. We wanted to buy a house, but the HOA said we couldn’t because we had a pig. We’d have to give up the pig. And she’s part of the family, so that was a no-go. We actually ended up being on the news, different stations, we were in newspapers, and that’s how they found our story. At the same time, they were planning a gala to fundraise for the Boys and Girls Club, and they thought it would be a great idea to have a local celebrity of Nola, the Minipig be part of it. And they came up with the Kiss a Pig campaign. So we thought it was a great idea. We had heard of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Western Pennsylvania, but we didn’t really know very much about them or what their mission was or what exactly they did for the community. As we planned the fundraiser with them and spent the couple months together at the gala, it was just such an incredible organization. They do so much great for the community, for the children. They have after-school programs, they have summer camps. We just really got connected to the mission of the Boys and Girls Clubs. And that’s how they became our longstanding charity.

Dan Crogan: So we talked about the basement where it all started. And as you’re thinking about the vision, the impact you’re going to make, you also have to start thinking about a name. How did the name ProspHire come about?

Chris Miladinovich: That’s actually a really funny story. So when thinking about a name, it really was just one more thing we had to do. We didn’t really think that it was a big deal. So I went off and, you know, came up with these weird requirements. One, it had to be less than two syllables. Two, the domain name had to be available. And three, it had to be easy to say. I thought that all of the requirements were met, but here’s the best part. I drew this graphic of ProspHire, the first logo ever made, which looks atrocious today, but it was whatever. I showed it to Lauren, and I said, What do you think of this? She’s like, I think it looks great. And then I went and showed it to like three other people. And they’re like, I think it looks great. Oh yeah. It makes a ton of sense. Then we take it into the market and nobody can pronounce it. Nobody can understand what it is, what it means. And it just didn’t do well in the market. Where it came from was we were writing the mission statement at that time. And the mission was our clients hire us to prosper. And our mission’s not very different today. It’s just, it’s just much more eloquent. But we smashed Prosper and Hire together. And, and that’s how we got ProspHire. So, after that we spent, almost in the, in the first couple years, we spent a lot of dollars on marketing. Two different Firms, saw over a thousand different names. And we were married to it.

Lauren Miladinovich: That’s right. Talk about a challenge. People thought we were a staffing Firm because of the word Hire in there. We get some funny propshire, we get that a lot. Crossfire, we get sometimes. So it’s a lot of fun that we have with the name.

Chris Miladinovich: We’re going to be talking a little bit now about what it is we do and why we do it. And I’ll tell you that the business we’re in is one of the most rewarding industries to be in healthcare. The people that we ultimately help are people in need, need of healthcare, especially some of our clients that serve government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid that is really helping some of our most vulnerable individuals in the country. And it is just an absolute honor to serve them. But why did we choose to get in that field is a really, I think, an interesting way we got here. Personally I’ve been in consulting for a very long time. I spent my whole professional career there. I did a lot of health and human services work along the way. And it has just been something that has been a passion of mine to do things and help businesses that help others.

Dan Crogan: Yeah. The focus is key and it allows, allows us to specialize and also attract the right talent on who we want to work with and who we’re able to work with. As well as who we’re attracting to the Firm.

Chris Miladinovich: Dan, I think good work leads to more. And I think we’ve done such a good job with our clients that wherever they go, whether it’s to a new company or within the same company, and especially the referrals. Our clients refer us to other clients. And it’s just, I think the biggest compliment in the world to receive a client referral or an employee referral to join the Firm, it’s really endorsing the business and what we can do. We started our small business in Pittsburgh and really meant to be a small local organization, but in a short three years, we started having clients all over the country, Michigan California, Texas, Virginia Florida, all over the place. And in consulting, you have to go to where the work is. And also, how do you become a great consultancy without going out and getting new and exciting experiences with different clients in different markets? And what’s really rewarding is the clients in the different states and geographies were taking a chance on bringing this boutique consultancy from Pittsburgh in, because they knew that whatever they gave us, whatever the goal was, they trusted it was going to get done. And that has been our staple from day one. And as long as we’re all here, that’ll be our staple. If we promise a client something, they’re going to get it.

Dan Crogan: We’re an extension of their team, and that’s the core of ProspHire. We, you know, whenever the two of you started with one full-time hire, the CEOs of health plans weren’t asking how to redefine their health plan or what the strategy should be. You know, they needed project managers. They needed people that were going to get things done, understood the business and could trust them. And with that trust builds more trust and more opportunities. And one turns to two and two turns to three. And all of a sudden, because of the specialty, because of the focus clients may go to other places, but they knew whatever they gave us, they knew it was going to get done. They knew that we were comfortable bringing risks to them and, and working through them with them. Because at the end of the day, if we’re doing the right thing for them, those conversations may be difficult but they’re the right thing to do. And building a business on those core values which we all have and the 70 plus people have done has brought us from a local consultancy to a nation, a nationwide consultancy and more to come from here.

Chris Miladinovich: As we’ve grown, we have gained. We have hundreds of thousands of hours of experience now over the years as a Firm. We’ve done tens of millions of dollars of added value, generated billions of actual tangible enterprise value for other companies. And we’ve brought in subject matter experts from every facet of healthcare. We are at the top of our license. We are adding value at the top of the value chain, and we are able to provide some of the best advisory services in the field.

Lauren Miladinovich: And Dan, you mentioned our core values and relationships are our number one core value. So when we partner with our clients, we partner with them and we’ve become trusted advisors to them. We aren’t out to just sell them something to sell them something. We really care and we really look to see what they need, what’s going to help them, where are they having issues and challenges and how we can partner with them and work shoulder-to-shoulder to bring those solutions to them.

Dan Crogan: Yeah, I would agree. And you know, I, speaking for myself, I’ve been very fortunate. A lot of the clients we’ve met with over this time have become very close friends of ours. I think all of us can say we’ve known we’ve gone on vacation with some of our clients. We’ve become best friends with them. We know their kids and a lot about them. And whenever you get to know and have those genuine relationships, you also know what their goals are, their professional goals. The personal goals and they know the same with us. And it truly is a partnership whenever we work with our clients and we can obviously do the strategy in the execution side of things. So we’re able to put our money where our mouth is. And I think that’s been able to build our client base quite a bit and make an incredible impact.

Chris Miladinovich: Wow, what a great discussion. I really enjoyed reflecting on the past eight years. I can’t wait to see what the next eight years and beyond have in store for us and especially all of our great people. I want to thank everyone that’s listening for tuning in and turning the volume up and listening to our first episode. I think we all hope we gave you a great sense of who the Firm is, who ProspHire is, and who we are as a leadership. If you have any questions for Lauren, Dan or myself, please reach out to us at prosphire.com. We have a great contact form on our webpage. And make sure that you tune in and listen to some of the future episodes. They’re really great. We’ve got some great content and great speakers involved. We’re going to talk about the Affordable Care Act. We’re going to talk about some really interesting perspectives on social determinants of health. And then we have special guests in pharmacy that are really changing the way Pharmacies being done, bringing distinct care to the patients through means of the pharmacies. So we’re excited to have those episodes coming up soon.