Lead Health

Lead Health

• Rank: 4
• Headquarters: Los Angeles
• Top staffing segment(s) served: Travel nursing
• Final 2022 revenue: $76.3 million
• Final CAGR 2018 through 2022: 143.3%
• Website: leadhealth.com

It takes something special to make it onto the list of fastest-growing staffing firms three years in a row. Lead Health has proudly earned that accolade, but not for one special reason - there are 11.

Based in Los Angeles, Lead Health was founded in 2013 by Laban Pattanaik. What originally began as a per diem nursing company evolved a few years later into a staffing firm almost exclusively focused on travel nursing. In 2019, Pattanaik found himself navigating a family health crisis that led him to reevaluate the business model. Inspired by the healthcare providers who cared for his family in their time of need, Pattanaik was filled with renewed energy and commitment to do things differently. His first move was to find the right people to join the Lead Health movement. Not long after, Pattanaik met Justin Allison and Kyle Morey-Leber, and together, the three embarked on a journey that would transform Lead Health.

Lead Health has experienced tremendous growth over the past three years, but not by coincidence. At the turning point in Lead’s history, Pattanaik realized that it would take extreme clarity of purpose and values to create something different.

“We didn’t start with a goal to grow exponentially,” Pattanaik reflects. “It started with getting the right people on the bus, showing them a vision of what is possible and then getting out of the way.”

This strategy has clearly worked, as Lead grew to revenue of $75 million from about $10 million in a span of about three years. The pandemic occurred during this time, but Lead saw a strategic opportunity to expand nationwide. Post-pandemic, the travel nursing market is normalizing, and Lead is taking that as a cue to refocus on the West Coast region, which comprises 85% of its core business. Allison, who is Lead’s chief growth officer, views this strategy as a long game that enables the company to provide “unreasonable hospitality,” focusing on its market in a way they couldn’t if they were trying to be all things to all people.

Relentless focus is just one quality that many Lead team members exude. Morey-Leber, Lead’s chief operating officer, greatly values the autonomy and trust that flows through the organization, but he most appreciates the alignment of culture, values and passion that inspires Lead-ers (as Lead team members are called) to have a positive impact on the heroes of the patient care story.

Instead of tracking ROI, Lead focuses on a different metric: return on relationship, or ROR. Morey-Leber says, “We don’t celebrate revenue numbers or give bonuses based on margin. We care about net promoter scores and the Lead-er’s willingness to go out of their way to create a positive experience.”

Innovation happens at Lead not by reinventing the wheel but by “simply taking the best ideas from other platforms and industries and applying them to the work that we do,” Morey-Leber says.

Whether this is obsessing about maintaining clean data so they can easily take advantage of automation and AI, or creating Lead Media, an entity under the Lead Health umbrella geared toward winning the attention economy, Lead is constantly challenging the status quo.

“It’s a new era in developing relationships,” Allison says, “and we have an opportunity through our brand to connect and provide value.”

Pattanaik sums it up: “Every decision we make is intentional and is guided by our values. When you bring in people who have passion and a common purpose, magic starts happening.”