Medical Manager Corporation was born out of a successful IPO on February 2, 1997. Out here in the woods of Alachua, not only did I maintain my position as president of our large R&D facility, but I also became CEO and chairman of the board of directors of the new company. I was completely naive as to how much work I would be taking on as CEO. I quickly realized that it was going to require all the one-pointed focus I had developed through my years of meditation. I had surrendered, and this was the task life had given me. That made it part of my spiritual journey, and I was fully prepared to devote myself to it to the absolute best of my ability.
The first thing I did was take the steps necessary to assure that I would know what was going on in the company. I was in Alachua, and a group of independent-minded executives accustomed to running their own businesses were scattered around the country. If I was going to take responsibility for the company, a thorough flow of information needed to pass across my desk. This was going to require regular group conference calls and an enormous amount of reporting to keep up with what everyone was doing. When I announced that each executive had to turn in a weekly report on the major activities under their domain, there was definitely some grumbling. But together we had an enormous amount of experience, and I wanted the group-mind making decisions, not any one person’s mind.
It wasn’t long, however, before I realized that I couldn’t possibly keep up with all the weekly status reports plus be properly prepared for the executive conference calls. I needed some serious help, and as you may have guessed by now, that is exactly what I got.
We won’t call it a miracle, but this time life’s magic showed up in the form of a young lady named Sabrina. Paul Dobbins had met her years earlier at one of our national dealer seminars, and apparently, it was love at first sight. Not too long after that, Paul informed us that Sabrina was moving here, and they were getting married. I didn’t know Sabrina, and I was concerned that Paul expected her to move into a yoga-based spiritual community when she wasn’t even into yoga or meditation. He assured me that she would fit in just fine, and he also informed me that I would be very pleased to have her work at the company. Surrender, surrender, surrender—like I had a choice.
As it turns out, Sabrina’s family business was a small Medical Manager dealership in California. She had been selling, installing, and supporting practice management software since she was thirteen years old. Though she was only twenty-two when she began working at Personalized Programming, and had never even been to college, I soon found out that senior-level business analysis was completely natural to her. Despite the fact that she had no prior experience at this level, Sabrina was the person I turned to for executive help when I became CEO.
With Sabrina at my side, one of my main responsibilities as CEO became growing the company. Fortunately, this was no ordinary company; the prospects for growth in the newly created Medical Manager Corporation were phenomenal. To start with, our growth would come naturally as we acquired our dealers. We had close to two hundred dealers, many of which would be very good acquisitions for us. As long as we had a steady stream of new dealers merging into the company, we had a natural source of growth.
Much more interesting to me, however, was the tremendous growth that could come from our ability to electronically connect our enormous number of doctors to the rest of the health-care industry, including insurance companies, laboratories, and pharmacies. Once we rolled support of our practices under one roof, we could provide a level of automation for the health-care system that would not only cut costs but also result in improved efficiency and patient care.
I sat down with Sabrina and told her that getting our hundred-thousand-plus doctors fully up on electronic claims and other health-care transactions was going to be our first new corporate business initiative. I then informed her that she was going to be in charge. This was the birth of what we called Medical Manager Network Services. The success of this venture at so many levels was practically incomprehensible. It started out as an inspired vision and grew into a $100-million-a-year line of business. In a very short period of time, we led the industry in electronic transactions.
Over the next two years, the company grew by leaps and bounds. We kept acquiring more and more of our dealers, and our nationwide presence meant we could provide our services to larger and larger clients. Meanwhile, I never worked so hard in my life. But it didn’t burn me out. In fact, it had the opposite effect. The more I let go of “Mickey” and just committed myself to the task life had given me, the more the spiritual energy flow increased within me. It was as though by aligning myself with life’s outer flow, the beautiful, inward flow of energy was naturally strengthened. By now, I had become thoroughly convinced that the constant act of letting go of one’s self-centered thoughts and emotions was all that was needed for profound personal, professional, and spiritual growth.