I’ve always been called a bit of a maverick — or a cowboy.
Maybe it was growing up in Colorado, out in the rugged foothills, listening to “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” and “The Cowboy in Me.” It taught me that cowboys respect anyone who puts in the work, but they never stay inside the fences — especially the old ones somebody else built. So that’s what we’re going to do: challenge the status quo and tear down the fences that have constrained post-acute and senior living providers.
I’ve spent more than a decade in skilled nursing and senior living — starting as an Administrator-in-Training, earning my license (LNHA), and climbing every rung to executive leadership at Ohman Family Living. Every step up taught the same lesson from a different seat: growing an institution comes down to capital allocation, and you can’t allocate what you can’t see.
I’ve sat in a room full of people making gut estimations on whether we could afford to take a referral and not go underwater — hoping we were right. I’ve fought for budget dollars to grow the business armed with cost data that was already stale, because operators run on thin margins and every dollar has three jobs. And I learned firsthand: without objective data, all you have is a good story to tell over dinner. No health plan or hospital will take you seriously.
I’ve also sat through the software demos. I’ve signed the deployments. And I’ve watched the promise die in the hallway — tech that never matched the workflow, dashboards nobody opened after week two, solutions that added a login and subtracted nothing. Call it what it is: we paid for promises and got shelfware. Out of margins that had no room for it.
And that wasn’t the worst of it.
I watched good operators leave the game. People who ran honest buildings and cared for residents like family — gone. Not because they couldn’t operate, but because the financials couldn’t survive the market shifts. Cost data two years old. Margins moving faster than the reports. By the time they saw the problem, the problem had already won.
The industry treats those losses like weather — something that just happens. It isn’t weather. It’s the absence of the information you need to make effective decisions. It’s the real-time costs you need to run a solvent operation. It’s the ability to predict where you’ll be in three to six months on solid data. Operators are losing without those things — and I refuse to accept that.
We’re building Decisive to end it. To retire the old claim that you have to be a non-profit to run a quality organization — and that if you’re for-profit, you have to forsake quality. That trade was never real. It was a data problem wearing a moral costume.
The truth the industry keeps dodging
Post-acute and senior living providers must get paid for the value we create.
We keep people out of hospitals. We carry the hardest patients through the hardest days. That value is real, it is measurable, and it deserves to show up in the money — not just the mission statement.
We will usher in a new era where quality providers thrive, powered by the financial intelligence layer Decisive brings to their operation. Real, defensible dollars in front of an operator while there’s still time to act.
I believe the operators who stay in this fight are the answer to the national healthcare crisis. My job is to make sure the numbers never take another good one out of the game.
