Q&A with Klick’s Lori Grant and Leerom Segal

Med Ad News spoke with Klick Health CEO Lori Grant and Klick Group Chairman and CEO Leerom Segal about the Klick Group of companies’ release of details surrounding several significant advancements and achievements since December 2019, including advancing two stealth incubation initiatives with accelerated launch timelines.

Med Ad News: Lori, how has 2020 treated you as CEO of Klick Health?

Lori Grant: I’ve been at Klick for the past 13 years, and I have to tell you that I’m home. I’m home because I am in the very fortunate position of working with extraordinary people. Here I am, 9 months ago announced internally as CEO of this amazing company, and I have to tell you, it’s been quite inspiring while the world has changed so significantly in nine short months from when that announcement occurred, I’m really fortunate to work among the brightest minds of our industry, and we continue to add to that, and I’m just really grateful for the energizing and collaborative spirit. So when we say there’s something different here, there really is.

Med Ad News: How have you managed all of the recent expansion and organizational changes during “COVID time”? What are the challenges that you’ve had to overcome, especially in onboarding new team members, making sure all the work gets done, and that clients are satisfied?

Lori Grant: I think the real challenge for us, first and foremost, is the safety of our teams, the safety of our families, and the safety of our clients, and their families. So first and foremost, once we got everyone settled in [to working remotely] and it took us a couple of days to get everyone settled in, and we’re well conditioned for that eventuality – once we got there, the biggest challenge we’ve always faced is talent. How we cast the team, and how we take such good care of our culture, that’s the biggest challenge we’ve had and have always had. Our belief is if we take such good care of our culture, and the people we bring on board – and as you’ve seen, we’ve brought on some very extraordinary people – that really enables our people to thrive and so that team can ultimately deliver for our clients. In the end we have very happy, capable teams and externally we have very incredibly grateful and happy clients. And that goal doesn’t change because of the pandemic. So that’s where we are and with the right team, the goal is any of those business challenges that come your way get the agility and stability of that time to manage the issues that may arise. And obviously we’ve been doing something right because that’s been proven in the performance of our company year over year.

Med Ad News: Please discuss Klick’s recent advancements and investments, including accelerating the official launches of Klick Consulting, Klick Ventures and several new practice areas during a very challenging time.

Leerom Segal: Let me take a step back and say these are two new missions we actually started a couple of years ago. What we’re really doing is publicly unveiling them. In many ways all of these announcements are part of us becoming more explicit and articulating what the ecosystem looks like and some of the division of responsibilities. Starting with Lori’s part, Lori has been super modest, besides being incredible and inspiring, with a blend of kind and wise and curious and empathetic and all the things that make Lori such a wonderful partner. I’ll share witth you that this was actually a role that was offered to Lori three years ago. And Lori being the incredibly thoughtful leader that she is, finally felt that the timing was right this December. But the reality is tthis is really the role that Lori has had for the last few years and it’s in that capacity that she’s ensured, and continues to ensure, we deliver to our outstanding standards. … This was a title that was offered to Lori on multiple occasions and in typical Lori style she timed it perfectly because I can tell you, during the last three years, we’ve been consistently lucky as we had the 23 years before. And the last nine months, not only was Lori doing a better job than I could ever have imagined, the last nine months have been our most record-breaking.

Med Ad News: Please describe some of the people and cultural practices at Klick that have managed to keep the business thriving while many other companies have found it challenging to operate in such a different atmosphere recently.

Lori Grant: That’s almost a two-part question, because there’s the cultural component of ensuring that the business is thriving and that everyone feels amazing as Klicksters and that they too are “home” as I am. And there’s the side of it where we’ve brought Sue [Easby, senior VP of People & Organizational Effectiveness] and Glenn [Zujew, chief people officer] and enhanced their roles so we can scale the magic. And the reality of it is, as we look to the future, really the answer is simple. It’s about what we’re doing for preserving that culture and continuing to support that world-class team that we have added to, sustaining our client experience, and maintaining those outstanding results that we speak of. And so that mission is about safely scaling the magic. Leerom, I think it may be good for you to speak as to Glenn and Sue’s role.

Leerom Segal: In terms of what Lori and I have worked on hand in hand with Glenn and Sue to architect, it’s been a very careful design of our culture, from how we hire to how we articulate our expectations, to our cultural behavior pyramid, to our principles, to how we make decisions – these are the things that we have closely curated, debated, and relentlessly worked hard to preserve. And at its core, what a company is, is a collection of people and principles. In terms of what led us to organize everything under a single role, and it’s a new role for us, the chief people officer, it’s just the scale of it.

To give you a data point that might illustrate, if you think of most organizations in our space, there’s a pretty high administrative head count. Including all of our accounting team, payroll, benefits, legal,  all of that at Klick is less than 1 percent of our company headcount. But what that allows is for us to invest elsewhere, specifically in various people-enablement functions. We have a lot of those spokeholes that don’t exist in most organizations – from our Mojo team, to our travel experience team, to our live experience team, to our talent experience team, to our concierge services…these are large teams that augment the more traditional talent functions including onboarding and training and performance and people analytics that other organizations might have.

Med Ad News: Please discuss the added positions of Senior VP of Diversity Strategy and a Senior VP of Policy & Advocacy.

Lori Grant: Our Cross-Cultural Marketing practice, led by Amy Gomez, actually began last year when Amy came on board with us. We’re a company that is always in beta, that’s always evolving, and last year when we really started looking at areas that deserve more attention, and we look at trends in that we’re a very data-driven company, and by 2045 you see that America will be a majority minority, you see that cross-cultural marketing is of utmost importance so let it begin now. I think the difference is with the way that we’re approaching cross-cultural marketing is as an insight-driven, strategic discipline where once you get the values, beliefs, and barriers of the multicultural patient and caregiver out, you can create one campaign to bring that to life. When we scanned what other companies were doing, many other companies were considering it as a late-stage execution, for casting or for translation. In reality, looking at where the data of where the population base is going and what those needs were going to be, that simply won’t service it. So we brought in cross-cultural marketing from that perspective.

When you look at diversity and equity and inclusion, what naturally has come out of that with many of our client companies this year, is many committees and initiatives to talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion within their companies and how do you market to population bases with those at the very core. And of course we’re very uniquely positioned to sit at the table with our clients and speak of that.    

And looking at the landscape of the industry itself, many areas in which we work are really deeply affected by government decisions and policy initiatives, initiatives like reimbursement, access, scientific research, regulatory, approval are just some of the policy decisions that can expand or contract based on the use of a medicine or health service. Of course all of those are affected by advocacy, and now more than ever that’s really important. We’ve been speaking with David [C. Bowen] for a very long time as our lead for a new policy and advocacy function, and couldn’t be prouder of the expertise that he brings to the table to help us bring that to life.

When we look at 2020, we see it as a year of possibility and not really a year of pause. We’ve let nothing stand in our way of innovation and growth and evolution.  

Med Ad News: What do you expect to happen with Klick’s business in 2021? What path do you see going forward?

Lori Grant: 2021 is still a few months away, I think what you can expect to see from us is continued evolution, continued growh, the continuing of adding extraordinary talent to the company, which helps fuel that growth. And because we’re such a data-driven organization, at the very core, and when you look at the trends within the industry – the rapid pivot to digital and technology, where as a company, we’re extremely suited and positioned for that given the foundation of the company and have grown over time…but I think that for the first time ever in the industry, we are experiencing a true paradigm shift. The longer that COVID goes on, there is no “going back” to normal. There is a new reality for all of us coming back. So that new paradigm shift, we’re at the front of that and helping bring that to life.

Leerom Segal: We think of what we have seen around COVID is a forcing function if you will. The degree to which COVID has required our customers and everyone to embrace technology more and digital absorption and the changes in behavioral patterns, we think many of these are one-way streets. We’ll see more digital consults than what happened in all of 2019. If you’re a physician and you just collected the same fees for two minutes of your time to refill a scrip from the comfort of your couch, and your patient loved that experience, they found it to be more convenient, and you’ve got the app and they’ve got the app, chances are that this is a pattern that’s going to persist post-pandemic. And what we’re looking for really is those places where we’re already seeing a universal preference for that change. That’s not going to be true in every disease state, but what we’re doing is analyzing and leaning into the places where those preferences are clear, where these new business models are more convenient and profitable, because we believe it’s a lot easier to ride a wave than create one.

And one of the reasons why you’ve seen us accelerate the public unveiling of our consultancy and our ventures team, why we took these groups out of stealth, is because of the market timing and the opportunity that we’re seeing.