From Dorm Room to Board Room

From Dorm Room . . .

TO BOARD ROOM

Clint Jones and Brandon Cruz met their freshman year at Miami, living across the

hall from each other in Wilson Hall. Clint didn’t have a lot in common with his roommate, and Brandon’s roommate made the decision to leave school. Brandon recalled, “Either I was going to get a random new roommate or Clint could move into my room. So we shared a room the second semester.” They quickly became friends, and that friendship evolved into creating business ideas together.

Clint started as a marketing major, adding information systems after talking with Brandon, an IS major, and deciding the job opportunities were better with the added degree. Both convinced their parents to let them stay at Miami an additional semester – Clint for the second major, and Brandon because he wanted to take the only entrepreneurship class offered at the time.

They started their first business together, CheapShotz. com, in 1998 while still students. The business involved taking photos at bars and parties and selling prints of them.

After graduation, both moved to Chicago, where Brandon grew up, taking “real” jobs. Brandon as a software engineer, and Clint in sales. They never stopped thinking about creating another business. Soon they collaborated on a website creation and management company. While searching for insurance for themselves, they identified an opportunity that became the basis for GoHealth, a marketplace that helps people find insurance. One of the biggest challenges a startup faces is hiring the right employees. Clint and Brandon knew just where to look. Brandon recalled, “Miami was our pipeline of people for our company and for the first five, six, seven, eight years.” Clint added, “

I’d say that when we went to 50 employees, 35 of the 50 probably were from Miami. When we first started, we had a couple buddies, or brothers or sisters of friends we went to school with and were looking for jobs and we hired them and they just kept referring. I think at one point in time, literally our entire sales department was probably 90% from Miami.”

“ I FEEL LIKE

WE’VE PIVOTED

DOZENS OF

TIMES. IT’S

PROBABLY

ACTUALLY FIVE

LARGE PIVOTS,

BUT IT FELT

LIKE WE WERE

PIVOTING IN THE

EARLY DAYS A

LOT.” Fast forward to 2020. GoHealth now employs nearly 2,500 people and is repeatedly named one of the best places to work in Chicago. The company completed an initial public offering and on July 15, rang the NASDAQ opening bell (virtually). The company’s valuation on that day was nearly seven billion dollars.

But the path from their dorm room brainstorming certainly wasn’t a straight line. A key was their ability to pivot. Clint remembered, “I feel like we’ve pivoted dozens of times. It’s probably actually five large pivots, but it felt

like we were pivoting in the early days a lot. I think that anytime you start a company, your initial vision or business plan is probably not what you’re going to end up with. I think we realized that early on and we just remained opportunistic. And when things came up or we had to change, we looked at it more on the opportunistic side versus being pessimists and just found the opportunity to build really good connections and we had really smart people we were working with.”

Brandon agreed, “What we know now is your business is never what you expect it to be when you embark on creating a company. You think you’re going in this direction, and then you have to move and go in in another direction as opportunities or challenges arise. And you need to have that never quit attitude, always find the opportunity. I would encourage people not to have the perfect plan. We had an 80 page business plan we had put together and we were going to sell content management systems for websites. An insurance agent walked into our office one day and everything changed. So I think it’s important to be flexible.

“Right now, we’re evolving into a marketplace that not only helps people find insurance, but helps them find the right doctors to do the right procedures, take the right medications, get access to telemedicine, health risk assessments and a whole variety of other things.”

As the future of health care evolves, Brandon and Clint’s entrepreneurial spirit combined with their optimistic attitude will help them chart a path – for their clients and their company. b

KEYS TO GO HEALTH’S SUCCESS

“Number one, we built great relationships from the very beginning. We stood by what we said and we did what we said we were going to do for the insurance executives, for employees that we hired, for partners that we worked with.

“Number two, be efficient with your capital. I remember back in the day, we’d have to pay with physical checks because we needed the float of three days for the money to come in from our customers. So we were very efficient with our capital.

“Number three - and most importantly, this is everything - we hired amazing people out of the gate. We had this network of people from Miami that we had known for years and we knew their passion and their work ethic and their intelligence.”