Sitting in the Suck

My thoughts race a million miles per hour, so this blog is an opportunity for me to sit down, breathe, and get my thoughts on paper. My hope is that it is not only cathartic for me but will hopefully shed some light into both the journey of Nexus and my personal journey as the CEO. I will try to explore the day to day issues that a CEO faces as well as insights into revenue cycle management and the healthcare industry from my perspective.

There is much talk about the new normal, work from home will soon be redundant, balancing your “To-Do’s” and fixing your child’s iPad for the ninth time in 3 days is now par for the course. The hyphen between Work-Life balance is quickly shrinking and this will cause some pretty significant issues for CEOs and managers over the next couple of years. Managers have a tough time turning off, the problems that we face daily seem to linger whether we are at work or at home, so finding ways to shut off is important for not only our mental health but for being mentally fit to focus on strategy and execution.

For many (including us) COVID-19 has exposed issues that were not really addressed during the “good times”. Having to deal, suddenly, with decreased cash flow led to having to make decisions that had long term consequences for our business and for our team. I had to remind myself that sometimes hard decisions just suck. No one wants to lay-off an employee for no fault of their own, it just sucks. When COVID hit I had a feeling that many business were going to use it as an opportunity to cut costs, they had something to blame. For us, I wanted to make sure that any decision that we made required us to “sit in the suck”. It was important for me that we did not become desensitized to looking at employee’s wages as a number on a spreadsheet, but rather as food on their families table. Our management team had to make some pretty difficult decisions but we always tried to be empathetic and sensitive to the fact that sometimes things just suck.

Akiva