Healthcare MarketMaker Is Building the Zillow for Healthcare Practices

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Nashville is a city built on healthcare, so it’s not surprising we see a lot of healthcare startups come out of it.

Healthcare MarketMaker is trying to become the “Zillow for healthcare transactions.” Essentially, they are building a marketplace for doctors and dentists looking to sell their practices.

This is one of those solutions you just won’t find in Silicon Valley. Read more about Healthcare MarketMaker in our Q&A below:

incontent3What’s your startup called?

Healthcare MarketMaker is empowering healthcare buyers and sellers.  Think Zillow for the healthcare transaction space.

What’s your big idea?

Healthcare MarketMaker provides online comprehensive marketplace technologies to healthcare buyers and sellers.  Healthcare MarketMaker is the solution for originating and closing medical and dental practice transactions.  Healthcare MarketMaker also offers specific transaction and marketing services for physicians, practice brokers, equipment brokers and other transaction vendors to ensure the best service and efficiency. Healthcare MarketMaker is an early stage company founded in 2013 and is currently in residence at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center.

What’s the story behind your idea?

After spending 20 years in the healthcare transaction space, working for companies like HCA, Ernst & Young and others,  I realized that deals were still being originated and completed without technology enablement.  There did not exist a robust healthcare transaction platform.  Healthcare MarketMaker is that agnostic, cloud based SaaS platform.

The key to our marketing is the depth and positioning of our strategic partnerships.  We believe in creating exclusive partnerships with specific subspecialty associations in each market.  For example, partnering with chiropractic associations in each state will enable us to create more value for the association members while offering a means to increase membership levels for the associations.  We also enrich associations’ value by providing content about the marketplace in their annual meetings, newsletters, and other communications.

 Our practice broker partnerships also enjoy early and qualified lead origination as our platform identifies active physician buyers and sellers vis-a-vis the association relationship.  When a physician may be looking to buy or sell a practice, he may look for guidance from his state association.

Currently, the healthcare market is being disrupted by two very large macro drivers.  We have an aging physician population in the US.  Over 33% of physicians, or approximately 400,000 physicians, are aged 55 or older.  These physicians will be looking to retire and exit their practices in the next ten years.  Also, the Affordable Care Act has increased vertical and horizontal integration in the provider space.  Sole proprietors are selling to hospitals and large multispecialty groups in an effort to create scale to combat downward pricing pressures and compliance requirements.  Therefore, the number of healthcare transactions is continuing to accelerate.  The size of the US market is approximately $29 billion annually.

Who are the founders?

As I mentioned, I founded HCMM after in 2013 after continuing to hear physicians and dentists in the marketplace indicate a need for help in sourcing a good partner to help them buy or sell their practice.  We’ve built strong Executive and Advisory Boards to help us in this crucial developmental stage.

Where are you located?

We are currently based out of the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, not only a great resource for the regional start-up community but for the larger business and creative communities.

What’s the startup scene like there?

The startup scene has really exploded in Nashville in the last 5 years.  The resources available to entrepreneurs are more easily found and the local community with regard to vendors who understand the needs of startups has grown more sophisticated.  HCMM tries to use local vendors specializing in startup services.  For example, we’ve use CentreSource to develop a product demo that we use daily as our electronic business card.  Also, we’ve used Ethos3 for pitch deck development.

What milestones have you reached?

We recently signed an LOI with Alliant Capital Advisors, the largest business broker in the Southeast.  Also, we raised our initial seed capital and have begun our beta platform development with Objectstream.

What are your next milestones?

To continue to develop more relationships with practice brokers and medical and dental associations.  We are also raising additional capital to hire the right tech co founder and stand up the market ready product.

Where can people find out more?

Please follow Healthcare MarketMaker on LinkedIn or our landing page at marketmakerinc.com.

Nashville Entrepreninjas Take Flight (sort of)

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By day Jared Marquette, Ryan Carter, Robbie Goldsmith, Sam Lingo, and John Murdock are Nashville-based entrepreneurs living the good life, making stuff, creating things and innovating. By night, they suit up in the ninja masks that they were reportedly born with, and become entrepreninjas.

Entrepreninjas is the name of the Michael Burcham and Nashville Entrepreneur Center backed team that competed this weekend in Red Bull’s Flugtag competition. Flugtag is a national competition that was held simultaneously across five US cities this past Saturday. The competition calls for teams to create a man powered flying machine. The machine is launched from a runway over water where it’s judged.

The celebrity judges were looking for creativity of craft, distance, and showmanship.

The Entrepreninjas built their craft in Nashville with part of the building taking place at the new Entrepreneur Center where team member Sam Lingo is the operations manager.

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Entrepreninjas built most of their flying machine at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center (photo: Facebook)

Michael Burcham, along with the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, Polar Technology, Track Ref, and the Thinkery teamed up to back the Entrepreninjas with the expenses of building a flight machine, getting it to Miami and entering the contest.  It seems like perfect sense. If these guys can build companies, they can easily build a flying machine, no problem.

The team competed against other teams in Miami as well as the four other locations. The top 3 teams from each location won prizes from Red Bull, including Red Bull sports and music experiences, and of course bragging rights.

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The flying machine looked great, judging from the photos on the Entrepreneur Center and Burcham’s personal Facebook page.

The team seemed to do very well in the showmanship category, showing off their ninja moves on the runway before launching the flying machine into the sky (or the water as it was).

As you can see from the video below though, they didn’t get very far in flight. The Entrepreninjas, despite a valiant effort, gave new meaning to the theory “Fail Fast.” But alas they are entrepreninjas and iteration trumps perfection, so I’m sure we will see them back out again next year.

This was an awesome showing for Nashville and a great team building exercise. For your enjoyment their flight video is below.

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Nashville Opens New 22,000 Square Foot Entrepreneur Center

Nashville Entrepreneur Center, Entrepreneur Center, Michael Burcham
Michael Burcham is a Nashville serial entrepreneur, angel investor, Startup Tennessee director, and Director of the Entrepreneur Center. On Thursday Burcham opened their new 22,000 square foot facility in the converted trolley barn at Rolling Mill Hill. The mayor, the governor, and Startup America founding CEO and Priceline founding CTO, Scott Case, were on hand for the opening of the new facility.

The new entrepreneur center has more space for education, collaboration, and acceleration within the walls of the 22,000 square foot building. It’s been outfitted with the technology needed to help achieve all of those goals.

The former Entrepreneur Center was always a temporary location after opening in May 2010. The center, led by  Burcham, immediately began a search for a permanent home and found it in Nashville’s creatively rich SoBro neighborhood in Trolley Barn #1 at Rolling Mill.

In addition to the new facility, the epicenter of Nashville’s startup ecosystem got a new name, sort of. They are now “The Nashville Entrepreneur Center”, thanks to a pending lawsuit from Entrepreneur Magazine which has a reputation for bullying entrepreneurial organizations that use their trademarked word in their name.

The new location is in the same park as one of Nashville’s most successful startups, Emma.

“It scales us in every direction,Burcham told the Nashville Business Journal. “It brings legitimacy to Nashville as the best place to start a business.”

The old trolley barns also serve as home to several other young companies. There are plans to build out a restaurant and possibly a bowling alley on the property that overlooks both the football stadium and the river.  Since it’s inception, the Nashville Entrepreneur Center has served as a hub for the thriving community which allows entrepreneurs to collaborate and learn from each other.

“Being with other people who are ahead of you in that process and in some ways behind you in that process, it’s sort of the crucible through which much, much better businesses go through,” Case said. “If you are not in place with a strong community … and Nashville is one of the fastest-emerging strong startup communities in the country, you tend to not have the quality of companies come out of it.”

You can find out more about the Nashville Entrepreneur Center here.

 

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Entrepreneur Magazine Trying To Rain On Nashville Entrepreneur Center’s Parade

Nashville Entrepreneur Center, Entrepreneur Magazine, Michael Burcham, Nashville startupWe are two weeks from the grand opening of Nashville’s new multi million dollar 22,000 square foot Entrepreneur Center. The effort, pioneered by Nashville’s startup community and Nashville Entrepreneur Center CEO Michael Burcham, is attracting bigwigs like TN Governor Haslam and Scott Case, the Interim President of UpGlobal and Founding CTO of Priceline.com.

Two days of festivities slated for later this month will christen the new space that will house startups, startups, and more startups. The facility features educational space, space for accelerators, and space for startups at all stages.

In a private walk through back in April, Burcham was gleaming from ear to ear highlighting the vision that the entire Nashville startup community has partaken in. Community contributors will be recognized in cloud-like structures in the ceiling of the new facility and in big round plaques in the floor.

But, it’s not all rosy in Nashville. The Tennesseean reported Tuesday that there is one California company hoping to rain on their parade. Apparently, Entrepreneur Media Inc bought the trademark rights to the word “entrepreneur” over two decades ago and has sued the Entrepreneur Center to force them to change their name.

Burcham, who was recently called Nashville’s Rocket Man by the Nashville Business Journal, doesn’t have time for this nonsense ahead of such a critical event for Nashville entrepreneurs (there sue me too). To comply, The Tennesseean reports that they’ve added “Nashville” to the name of the facility and organization, effectively calling it “Nashville Entrepreneur Center”.

EMI, which owns Entrepreneur Magazine, has prevailed in many cases when it’s taken someone to court, even though they say they don’t “own the word”

“We don’t claim we own the word. We have limited trademark rights on it,” Mark Finkelstein, attorney for the company told The Tennesseean. “If the company goes national, could it cause confusion? Could it dilute the brand?”

The argument itself comes down to the fact that entrepreneur is such a common word. We use it all the time, and there are several entrepreneurial organizations that use the word in their name.

The Tennesseean spoke to Daniel Gervais a law professor at Vanderbilt who specializes in trademark battles. He pointed out that it would be one thing if we were talking about a word like Kleenex or Xerox, proper nouns. However “entrepreneur” is different.

“This would be a good example of trademark law used to limit speech,” Gervais said. “It looks like they’re trying to own the word, but how far do they have to go to police the use of a word that is otherwise common?”

Both Burcham and the Nashville Entrepreneur Center have been featured within the pages of Entrepreneur magazine and their website. While the lawsuit is evaluated and a judge considers where a trial would occur, it’s full steam ahead for the new nonprofit.

The Nashville Entrepreneur Center will hold their grand opening in two weeks, next week, this big startup event will occur on June 12th and 13th, in Nashville.

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