IA weekend in Quanah
Quanah is a small town in North Texas. Heath grew up there. Mark was living there too when this story began, and Heath still calls it home today.
Nearly twenty years ago, a local rodeo clown was being treated for leukemia, and his family organized a replacement blood drive for him.
We had a contact center at the time. We were running survey calls for Angie's List, and that work was drying up. What was left was the kind of call center work that pays and means nothing.
So we donated the phones.
We called the phone book. Quanah is small enough that a few thousand names is an afternoon, and we had the seats sitting there.
What we did not expect was what it did to the room.
People who had spent months asking strangers to rate a contractor were suddenly asking them to give blood for a neighbor. Nobody had to be talked into taking a shift.
He died that January. The drive did not save him, but we had found work that meant something, and we did not want to go back to the other kind.
So we built a scheduling program.
About a year later, we had our first customer, a hospital blood program in Denver.
They are still with us today.
IIThe next two decades
That weekend turned into nearly twenty years in blood collection.
We ran telerecruitment programs from our own contact center. We built a recruitment application that was acquired by a leader in laboratory systems, who later brought us in to help build theirs. That system still runs in hospital-based blood banks today.
Along the way, we learned the work from a place software companies usually do not: inside it.
We talked to donors. Managed recruiters. Watched campaigns succeed and fail. Lived with the software when it helped, and worked around it when it did not.
Then, a few years ago, our own contact rates started falling.
Donors told us our numbers were showing up on their phones as “Scam Likely.” We changed the numbers. The new ones were flagged almost immediately.
So we started figuring out why.
We built tools to see what the carriers were seeing, understand why numbers were being flagged, and fix them instead of continually replacing them.
That work became ClearRoute and 448 Connect.
Many blood centers know us from that work today.
But caller ID was still only one part of the donor experience. The longer we worked on it, the more obvious that became.
IIIWhere Pulse came from
The idea for Pulse did not come from us.
For years, we had heard versions of the same complaint: the argument at the front desk over whether the appointment or the walk-in goes next.
It had become background noise, one of those problems everyone works around because it has always been there.
Then an operations director at a blood center said plainly that somebody ought to build something for it.
And it finally landed.
One afternoon in May, we sketched it out. By that evening, there were working screens.
Then we started talking to operators.
Those conversations brought the rest into view. Not just the line at the front desk, but check-in, donor flow, waits, handoffs, exceptions, communication and the duty-of-care record, something nobody asked for by name but almost everyone described.
And they exposed a blind spot we probably should have seen years earlier.
We had spent twenty years getting donors through the door, and we had never had a clear view of what happened after they arrived.
Pulse grew out of that realization.
It is built around a simple idea: the donor experience should not disappear into a black box the moment someone walks through the door.
IVThe two of us
We have been friends since the late nineties.
We started a business together that did not work out. Then came PhoneLogix in 2004, which became DonorLogix, then 448 Recruitment, 448 Connect, and 448 Labs.
Builds the products.
Twenty years of asking people to give blood taught him what the software should have been doing all along, and mostly was not.
When the carriers started labeling his own numbers “Scam Likely,” he built the fix rather than change numbers again, which is roughly how everything here has started.
One daughter and a forever-wife. Hunts, fishes, and builds things, whether that is with wood or software.
Runs operations and people. Wake Forest graduate.
He expects a lot from the work and remembers the people doing it. He knows every work anniversary in the company without checking, makes sure birthdays do not pass unnoticed, and keeps the prayer board.
Never met a stranger. Nobody who has asked him for help has gone without it. If you have talked to him once, you probably already know this.
Three daughters and a forever-wife. Gardens, fishes, and hunts.
And the name, since everyone asks:
Philippians 4:4–8.