How OrganizedWisdom is Dealing with the Economic Downturn: An Extreme Focus on Quality

Every company today is reviewing its strategy, goals, and budgets to adjust in this economic environment.  Our approach at OrganizedWisdom is very much the same and we thought it might be helpful to discuss the process we went through and the outcome of our review.

As entrepreneurs who lived through the dot com crash (as a publicly-traded company no less), we knew we needed to take this opportunity to review EVERYTHING very seriously. While the market had its worst month ever, OrganizedWisdom had by far its best month ever on every metric we track (i.e. unique visitors to the site, revenue, pageviews, WisdomCards published) so we asked the team two important questions: what can we do more efficiently and what can we do better?

We are fortunate to have raised a round of financing from an extraordinary group of investors a few short months ago and have always run a hyper-efficient operation (thanks to our "$0 Dollar Office" model). As a result, we are able to build our business with a very low burn rate.  While there wasn't anything major we had to cut from our budget we asked how can we improve our operation.  Not necessarily by spending less, but by taking action on things that will improve our product and our process.  We looked for opportunities to simplify, to leverage technology in more efficient ways, to save time, to train and communicate to our team better, and so on.  We ended up with one conclusion: we must continue to focus on improving the quality of our service.  As a health search service there is a high standard for quality and it's our belief that we can do a better job to keep improving our quality.  The more we focus our resources, time, and core team on building the best possible service for helping people find health information, resources and products they trust, the more progress we will make during the downturn.

We learned a lot going through this process. The biggest change was deciding to make sure that every single Guide in the program was the best of the best so that we can focus our efforts on building an elite squad of medical researchers, writers, reviewers and physicians. These changes were imperative so that we can focus on the quality control and product development that is essential for a health search service like ours.

The other big changes have to do with improving our process to make it more efficient.  A review of each of our systems helped us find ways to make our technology faster, improve our service and find ways we can work together as a virtual team more effectively.  The good news is that because we've been operating all along in a very efficient manner, we only had to make limited changes.  We are fortunate that our strategy enables us to focus 100% of our capital on talent, as opposed to offices, operational infrastructure, servers, computer equipment and so forth.  We are investing in a team of people who have one goal: building the best health information on the Internet.

We sincerely hope sharing a bit about how we are managing our company during today's changing economic environment will in someway be useful to you.  What others have shared has certainly been valuable to us. These are uncertain times, but we're optimistic about the innovation, passion and progress we see everyday.  It's a big mission to change healthcare, but there are hundreds of other companies and thousands of people working on the same mission.  Now that is change we can believe in...  

Comments

[Mehdi Akiki]

Thanks for your valuable insight.
As a founder of a telemedicine company I am faced with the same challenges.
I have also shared some thoughts about how telemedicine can be part of the solution to healthcare during economic downturns.
The article can be found here
http://blog.yourteledoctor.com/2008/11/01/how-telemedicine-can-be-part-of-the-solution-to-the-current-economic-climate/

Mehdi Akiki,
Founder Your TeleDoctor Inc.,
http://www.yourteledoctor.com
mehdil.akiki@gmail.com