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Stephen Bone

Crimson Medical Solutions

Stephen Bone


@0:22 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Hello everyone and weclome to the shades of entreprneurship, this is your host. Mr. Gabriel Flores, Today I am here with Stephen Bone. Stephen, introduce yourself. Who is Stephen?

@0:32 - Stephen Bone

Where are you calling in from? Thanks, Gabriel. Yeah, I'm calling in out of Spokane, Washington, originally from the west side of Washington and then went to Washington State University for bioengineering, which is where we started a nursing focus startup out of college.

So we've been pursuing that for the last few years up here in Spokane, where we came up here for an incubator and kind of most reached some milestone for what we're doing is starting our first clinical trial.

health here in the last month.

@1:02 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I love it. In fact, you mentioned that it's snowing up in Spokane right now.

@1:07 - Stephen Bone

Yep, snowing. It's kind of the joke in Spokane is second winter. So you usually have kind of the first wave and then people are like, oh my god, it's spring.

I'm so excited. But yeah, second winter appears to be here because there's about an inch of snow on the ground right now.

@1:21 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Oh man, that's so funny. Second one, that's the first time I'm here. We always tell people here in Oregon, we have the rain season and then we have August.

That's pretty much all we have.

@1:31 - Stephen Bone

Yeah, pretty similar on the West side of Washington.

@1:33 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

It's just yeah, I'm telling the West coast. In fact, folks, if you have not been out to the Pacific Northwest, we highly invite you to come out and visit.

It's beautiful. It's green. It's really plush. It's gorgeous out here. I can't can't lie. So Steven, let's let's talk a little bit about the Crimson Medical Solution.

But before we get into that, I kind of want to talk about you mentioned the incubator, so you kind of came up here.

You joined an incubator and then from that incubator, tell us kind of how you came up with this this creative.

@2:00 - Stephen Bone

solution, the creative medical solution that you have the Crimson. Yeah, totally. So I really started in our capstone class originally.

So our team of bio engineers, we wanted to make difference in nursing because of what we seen through our family members in the nursing industry.

It's just a rough working condition right now. We started a little bit before COVID. So COVID really exposed lot of the harsh working conditions that nurses are in, but that was really how we got started in the capstone class.

We sent out some surveys to the nurses that we knew, which is how we landed on the problem that we did now.

so I'll kind of, you know, have to go into the details of that problem that we're solving on our solution.

But then we got some money from business plan competition originally. So true kind of student entrepreneurs and student team, and then joined an incubator program through, it's called SP3 Northwest up in here in Spokane.

They've been really awesome to us, been amazing for our mentorship and helping us kind of grow up from student entrepreneurs to true.

entrepreneurs. And so, yeah, I like it.

@3:03 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

No, you mentioned you, your team during the capstone, you basically sought out, you're looking at a problem that you're trying to find solution, and then you found a solution.

So first, take us through that process, take the listeners to the process of what did you go through to kind of find out what this problem was, right?

@3:21 - Stephen Bone

How did you find the problem? Who was your kind of focus on? And then lastly, what was the solution?

Yeah, so we just essentially sent out surveys to a bunch of the nurses that we knew, to, you know, what things are outdated, what are you, what issues are you running into day to day, and what came up was Ivy Line Spaghetti.

So for a variety of reasons, we chose Ivy Line Spaghetti because we figured we could make a solution, make a 3D printed solution in our capstone class, but it really took off.

So the problem that we're addressing in Ivy Line Spaghetti is it's in the critical care space, so when you're when you're start taking care of the most.

sick of possible patients, they get really complicated IV lines. Those patients can have 10 or more IV lines in place running at the same time, which seems like a lot.

But if you take an example of someone who has sepsis, so their blood is infected, and they're having multiple organ failure or multiple organ dysfunction, I'm also non-critical.

So all of stuff is of learned through the nurses that we work with, but that patient can have an antibiotic running, can have calcium, magnesium, a saline line for hydration, TPN for nutrition, an opioid for the pain, a sedative to keep them sleep, you know, the list kind of goes on, right?

So all of a sudden you have a ton of these drips that this patient needs to stay alive, and you only have so many access points in the body to be running these drips in, and you add in that

not all these drips are compatible. So if you have incompatible drips running together into those access points, you could really easily kill patients.

errors come up because of these IV lines pretty often if you're not responsible in managing them. And the tools that hospitals provide to these nurses are tape labels, you know, household stuff for managing these really complex environment.

That's why it's called IV lines spaghetti. So that's really the extent of the problem that you're dealing with. And so what we make is a really simple solution.

lot of people call it Legos for IV lines. And we simply combine the step of labeling the lines with organizational tools.

So you have color coding for the lines and you connect them together in parallel to avoid the tangling. So it's just kind of taking a lot of the things that nurses normally do to manage their lines and making a lot formal.

you also take shift changes, right? So you have a patient that's in that environment for more than one day.

They're gonna be seeing a new nurse. Every single shift so how one nurse manages their lines might be slightly different than the next one So there's just I mean there's there's it gets really complex even this one simple issue in nursing So our solution just goes to make that one thing a little bit easier And for the listeners if you've ever been in the kind of the healthcare setting or if you've even watched you know Any type of show like a ER or you know some type of Grey's Anatomy You will see you know individuals with those large pumps behind their bed now those pumps You know what what you know Seven is mentioned is the drips right so these pumps basically are timers and each one of them have a different kind of timer and a different Frequency and a different dosage that's actually dripping down through the ivy's into these patients on the continuous basis because again These are patients that like probably in the ICU right they have they're very sedated They they they're not eating right because they're sedated they're they're unconscious right they're they're out and so having to provide the nutrition that he was mentioned as well that all this you know different variations of proteins is important

@7:00 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

as well to keep these patients going, and it gets messy. I'm going to tell you folks, because you have IV lines, and then have oxygen lines, and then you have the chest tube.

I mean, there's a lot of things. might have a drainage, right, for a Foley cat. There's just a lot of things that tend to get muddled in there.

And so what really the solution is, and I hope folks are watching on YouTube, or folks that are going subscribe to the newsletter, will have this so you can kind of visualize it.

But it truly is like a Lego. It really is kind of a Lego. Now, how did you guys come up with this?

I mean, it's super innovative, really smart idea. How did you come up with it?

@7:35 - Stephen Bone

Thanks. Yeah. And yeah, so definitely check out the visual, because it's highly visual on what it looks like. It's on our website, and I'm sure you'll link that, all of that.

how we came up with it was taking a look at the issue we really looked at, like, why aren't other solutions out there?

were pretty surprised to guys' taping labels when I talk to ICU managers today, and ask them how their nerves and manageable lines.

I keep expecting to see something different than what we've seen. but every time it's just tape labels and yeah so what we looked at why the current solutions weren't we had kind of asked why current solutions out there weren't being adopted and mainly used and the big thing comes back to workflow.

Nurses generally like their workflow is very important to them they really care about patient care but they're not going to put something into their workflow that is going to disrupt it if it's only making a minor change so our biggest focus was how do we fit into the workflow and it was combining labeling with the organization and really we were just like 3d printing pieces initially that was another reason we landed on what we doing we were thinking like maybe we could put some magnets in there we could do like a reusable organizer with like magnets that connect them together or it was really just kind of brainstorming but we had this really really cool opportunity to work with a critical access hospital near our university really early on where we're working.

with real nurses, real patients. Critical access hospitals aren't the exact setting for what we're doing. They're patients that are really critical.

They will transport them to larger hospitals. So not the exact setting, but to be able to work with real IV lines, real nurses, we're able to work with them and develop and change our product to make it work early on through 3D printing.

@9:24 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

One of the things you mentioned is this whole entire entrepreneurial endeavor started through the capstone through working through your organization.

So take us through that process. I want to hear how valuable was that capstone? Because I think you're the first guest I think I've had on that actually was truly able to go from capstone.

So folks that are maybe unaware what capstone is, it's kind of your senior thesis from a business perspective. You get together with people and you basically create a business.

And then you go and pitch that business to your teachers. And they kind of usually vote on saying like, you know, what's better.

from sometimes you're able to take that idea and do exactly what's happening here and scale it into a viable business.

So take us through your kind of capstone process. How did that kind of go and then how important and valuable was it to you kind of getting to where you're at today?

@10:15 - Stephen Bone

Yeah, so student entrepreneurship is so interesting now that I'm looking back on it because you take these like the students like as we are and I'm just so early in what I'm doing like so green as an entrepreneur.

So I'm always looking to constantly like learn and improve myself. That's kind of really big thing for what I'm doing now, but you know as students and I love working with students at the university that I know came out of and any other student entrepreneurs because you really haven't been out there and had a job and been in the professional world and then all of a sudden you're starting a company.

So it's just kind of this really, really bizarre thing and you have a lot of things against you, but in the capstone, you know, getting connected with those mentors, professors and the program, you know, it's just kind of getting that help.

to get off the ground, but yeah, the main thing was going through the programs as the most beneficial. So doing the business plan competition, going through iCorps, which is a NSF-funded program where you really focus on your customers.

So that's something that was really important to learn. Yeah.

@11:21 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

And, you know, you mentioned that you're really green, this is all new, right? What are some of the aspects that you've found relatively either easy or enjoyable during the early stages of your entrepreneurial journey?

@11:39 - Stephen Bone

Easy and enjoyable. I don't know. lot of it's really, really hard, but I really like working with the team and working with customers.

And I would say one of the biggest mistakes that we made was focusing a little too much on business plan competitions as a metric for success early on, know, those were

really, really valuable, but we weren't focused enough on reaching our customers. And so when we went out to do initial fundraising a few years in after, or, you know, a year into moving up Spokane and doing this, their main feedback was, make sure you know how to reach your customer and get in with them because that's the most important part.

So early on working with that initial hospital on the, you know, developing our product and working with the nurses, that was probably the most enjoyable part.

So for us, that customer is pretty inaccessible, but for other companies and entrepreneurs, especially if they're B2C, working with customers is just really, really fun.

@12:37 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You know, I'm going to come back to that because I want to, I want to ask how you do reach your, in fact, you do reach your customers.

But one of the things you mentioned too is like, you know, some of this, things is actually really hard, there's entrepreneurship.

So what are, what are some of the most challenging things that you've encountered as being an entrepreneur?

@12:53 - Stephen Bone

Yeah, I think just being really humble is hard. So accepting feedback and pretty early on I learned that anytime that I'm improving myself it's improving the company because as an early-stage company especially as a student entrepreneur the more you know our team members are biggest assets at that time so self development being really really important and getting feedback because there were lot of times where I thought we were doing such an amazing job and moving forward and then you have someone who's done it before that comes in and goes you're actually doing all these things wrong and you need to completely change the course of what you're doing so kind of going back to that like when we initially went out to do fundraising in 2021 that means you back was like how do you reach your customers you know like and we are planning to go you know slightly kind of somewhat outsource that process and and they're like you need to take that in house and you need to learn how to do it yourself and kind of like what are you doing so those conversations are really really hard when you get feedback from people

that you really respect, that you go, wow, you know what, you're right, and you're swallowing this hard to swallow a pill, that's inevitably going to help you out in the future.

And I would say the one thing, one of the biggest mistakes that we've made is, and the advice I've gotten recently, is it's a lot easier to do this kind of thing if you have someone on the team that's done it before.

So we have moved a lot slower than we possibly could have if we took that route.

@14:27 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, and that makes sense, you know, like you mentioned, you're not clinical, you're starting to learn a whole new medical jargon, that it's all brand new.

then because you do have to go into these sales pitch meetings, you kind of have to fake it until you make it, right?

You kind of have to put on the persona that you do, in fact, are very knowledgeable about this thing.

I always tell folks, if you want to sound really smart, tell me, explain something to me that a way a kindergarten can know it.

Then I know you know it. Like, if you can explain something to me the way it can garden will be able to understand it, then I know you know all of your information.

Now, one of things you also mentioned was, you know, building the brand, right? You said you had access to first, let's kind of talk about little bit, how having access to that critical care hospital early on your career was very beneficial.

And then let's talk about how do you reach your customers now?

@15:19 - Stephen Bone

Yeah. So that's been difficult because we essentially went from not doing any sales. I did some initial sales like back in high school, sold cut to a knives, which was a great experience for me.

I did pretty well. I actually broke our fast start record, which is the first amount of sales in your first 10 days of selling.

So I have a little bit of a sales background in that pretty limited. then on the other side, if you're going to be an entrepreneur, you essentially have to have someone on the team that's doing the sales at any point.

And that's not something we really leaned into initially. So at a certain point, I took on this sales responsibility within the company and we're

hospitals, which is not only B2B sales, it's like very complex, highly regulated B2B sales. So in terms of how we reach our customers, so far it's just been like networking and knowing people has been really the easiest way, is if we can get an introduction to the right person, then that's really the easiest way to do it.

But long term, we're still figuring out that process of how do we reach someone without that kind of non-scalable networking component.

So that's through independent sales reps, contracted reps, going through distribution, you know, doing like LinkedIn, email calls. So we're still kind of operationalizing that, operationalizing that on that side.

But even from the beginning, we didn't even know something that we thought was, oh, know, this process is kind of like, no, how to sell this product is, no, and it's somewhere out there that we can discover.

what we figured out is we had to kind of discover it, our ourselves, so had to learn who really cares about IV line organization for us, and what we end up learning is that our influencers for this model are nursing leadership and patients at 8D leadership at a hospital.

Our customer is the ICU manager and our users are ICU nurses, and for a long time we didn't even focus in on ICU, which was a big misunderstanding for the market that we had.

So, it's been a long process of learning exactly how we do this, and we have the basic structure together, but we're still learning a lot, even though we've started this initial trial, because as we go and scaled long term it's going to be scaling the sales process that has to be a lot faster.

@17:44 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, and I think one of the things that you're just going take away is you really do have to humble yourself when you're going into a new product development, because like you mentioned, hey, you guys were one targeting the incorrect people at one time or the correct market to create the wrong product, right?

at first and then like, are we really kind of thriving? you know, one thing I would recommend, you know, one of the things that medical professionals really find valuable is if you can figure out a way, there's two things, conferences, attending conferences and being able to provide some type of educational lecture and actually have a CE attached to it.

So you can actually, let's say for example, look, work with some of your clients, get a case study or two, and actually create a lecture around that, a one 45 minute lecture in our lecture.

Now, you're not necessarily branding your stuff, right? Cause you have to be unbiased when you're doing educational lectures. However, you can talk about how, you know, during the case studies, how your product benefited the patients, right?

And it's in a very organic way, you're getting a CE credit, and then you're able there kind of to talk about your product and you have champions, usually probably have a nurse, probably do that lecture with you.

The value right there is the education piece, right? The CE credit, but then you're also talking about your brain organically.

@18:58 - Stephen Bone

Yeah, totally. I actually, I recently went to the critical care organization specific to the Inland Northwest, actually had a talk where it was sponsored by, I believe it was Striker, but then they had a nurse expert just come in and talk about the process and they didn't even plug their product.

So it's the type of thing where exactly we were talking about like continue education credits, sponsored by Striker, they have products that surrounded the topic of everything, but they legitimately brought in a nursing expert to do with a whole talk and so it's just a value add with their name attached to it.

So those are the type of things we really want to grow into and another struggle has been bootstrapping, like how do we have enough, like where do we put our resources to that?

And so the next stage of things after we have these initial sales, it's going to be starting to do those, how do we get our name out there for conferences, CE credits, yeah, really excited to grow into those things.

@19:55 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, and I think, you know, one of the things you mentioned too, and I think it's very important that the listener really understands

And it's like identifying the right target market. I was actually speaking with a company recently, they're creating a software, not gonna say anything about it, but they're, in my perception, they're focusing on the wrong target market.

They asked them like, I can help you with this and do this, because I am, in fact, the right target market.

Like actually we're speaking with providers, the providers are gonna help us, like, your provider's never gonna touch this. Never, they will never touch this.

But I get it, I get the belief that they might, but at the end of the day, the providers, if it's not an Epic, if it's not like an actual medical records system, the likelihood of providing the touch is very slim, right?

Or a physical product, if it's a physical product, sure. But a software, I mean, outside of Epic, TV ads with you, they don't have time for anything else, an email, Epic and email, that's about it.

So just letting you guys know out there that our folks that are targeting certain folks in the healthcare industry.

Now, what would you say, you know, again, you're you're still kind of building what's your goal? What is the plan for the next, you know, iteration?

@21:07 - Stephen Bone

Where do you guys see yourself in five, 10 years? Yeah, good. Good question. And real quick, so for a little bit more on the target market, and I'll get into kind of next stage of things, one of our initial meetings will go with an IC manager and an emergency room manager.

And the IC manager goes, yeah, this would be great. We organize our lines. And then either emergency room manager goes, there's no way minuses are ever going to use something like this, because it's just way different in the culture.

So we've validated where our product would be, which is the high acuity invasion setting, and where it wouldn't be really early on.

And we didn't even listen to that. So we spent way too much time focusing effort away from the ICU, even though we figured that out so early on.

So that's just been a big frustration of me. Like there's so many things I'm frustrated with my past self on not making those learning.

and it's also like finding the right person. When we talk to intensivists like ICU docs, this absolutely does not land at all because they're not managing the lines.

They see it and some understand it, but there's just people out there that will understand and care about what we're doing and people that absolutely want.

So it's been really interesting to learn.

@22:15 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

That's a great call out.

@22:16 - Stephen Bone

That's a great call out. Yeah. So in terms of next steps, you know, this trial, we've been working on getting the trial for the last two years.

And so I am just super excited about this milestone. And this is a really fun time for us right now.

And once they purchase, we have some other hospitals within their system that are interested in trialing it next. So we have somewhat of a pipeline built out after this initial trial, but the next six to 12 months is going to be operationalizing the things that we're doing to be preparing for a seed round of investment.

So making sure that we know exactly how to run these trials and exactly how to get these trials, those numbers and all of that.

to be able to put some money into it to scale it up. then from there, it's going to be about few years of scaling that process, but we also expect to be acquired pretty early because in the medical device case, you have really simple products like this.

There's some other examples of simple products out there that fit really, really well into larger companies, portfolios, where getting acquired and partnering with those companies that have similar missions, work with similar customers, is the type of trend that usually happens for companies like ours.

There's not a lot of independent product companies out there in the healthcare space. So about three years about, this is where we're looking to see an acquisition like that, but it's not something that we're specifically targeting at a timeline.

There's also a few other products that we'd like to get started in this space. The whole goal is to get this one product out there, but there are a few other things within the same vein of patient safety improved workflow.

low, you know, high reliability, high visualization of what's going on in healthcare, that we might branch into once we're scaling the sales process of this.

So, so that's another potential avenue as well.

@24:14 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I like it. I got, I got to point out the, the awesome choice of words. Going to choose another vein.

like that just unintentionally, unintentionally healthcare comedy right there. Now, no, I really do love it. And I think it's, I truly believe that your company will, in fact, get purchased, you know, acquired pretty early on, because there are lot of, there's a lot of limited innovation in the medical field outside of true healthcare devices.

And I'm talking like, you know, heart care devices and things of that nature. There really is limited in this.

I think once you know, folks, the importance of the clinical trial, the fact that you have when you're going to get one going is so huge, because I do believe it's going to show there's some benefits.

And when it shows benefits to patient care, Now, hospital operations are like, oh yeah, we have benefits for patient care, we're going to lower length of stay, going to have like care for patients even better, bring it on.

we will happily spend money to help our patients get cared for better, right? And so this is, I truly believe that this is a product that probably will help that, right?

And I think the clinical trial will in fact show that. And so I'm really excited for you because I really think that the seed round is going to, I'm really excited, in fact, would love for you guys to come back, you know, after your seed round and kind of say, hey, how did that go?

know, because I think you're still drinking from the fire hose, still figuring out. And I feel like I'm kind of very fortunate to be part of it in the very early stages, because we've talked before, right?

This isn't, we've talked a couple of, I think it may be a month or two ago about the product, talking about, you know, just business advice, what, where we can go, people I can connect you with, right?

In my own community, right? And then it kind of transitioned into, hey, let's get you on the podcast as well to continue to build.

Now, with that said, right? because you kind of called and it's like, hey, Gabriel, how gonna get some advice about what we're doing in the healthcare world?

Steven, give some folks that are listening some advice about entrepreneurship, things that you've learned that you're glad you've went through the last couple of years that you kind of glad you went through because you made it today.

@26:17 - Stephen Bone

Sure. Yeah. You know, this is an interesting question because this is, I mean, this is what I asked for advice for all the time from people right now.

So still still learning a ton. But I would say that a big learning is that people want to help you.

So, you know, for example, in the conversation we had, you know, found you reached out, asked for advice around an entrepreneurship.

People are happy to give that kind of help. If you're not over asking for it. So I think that's been a big learning is is people want to help you out and getting your name out there.

You know, it's not necessarily super easy to get those conversations. But if you reach out to people a lot, then then you'll find people that want to help you.

And I would just say continually learning. is really, really important. So, dedicating some time to reading books and developing yourself is really important.

I'm big about routines,-improvement, those kind of things, so.

@27:13 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You know, two things you mentioned is, you know, finding help, right, and asking, and there's people out there that are willing to help you.

Tell me about your experience with the incubator, because you mentioned after your capstone, right, your capstone, then you went to a business incubator.

Talk about, tell folks a little bit about what a business incubator is in your experience going through it.

@27:33 - Stephen Bone

Yeah, so, business incubator is essentially connecting you with resources and mentors to get your business to the next stage.

Michelle Armstrong is one of the main people over at SB 3 Northwest, and she's actually from the Portland area.

So, she has, she was previously in their kind of business entrepreneurship incubator stuff over there, so she's been able to make some connections over in Portland.

But, you examples of things that we've been connected to through our incubator are an FDA consultant who walked us through exactly how we do our FDA.

They provided us with resources, they provided us with advisors, the clinical trial that we're doing, and it's not really it's more of a pilot, not necessarily a clinical trial because it's not like 510 K or yeah long story short, it's just it's kind of more it's more of a trial, less so clinical trial, but that chief nursing officer that we were able to connect with for that was a connection through our incubator, which is our most valuable thing that we've done to date is getting this trial started.

So it's been invaluable connections and there's been countless other connections that they've made that have turned into another connection, another connection where I'm sure you know if I traced everything back there are so many things that I've gained from being in that kind of program and there's a lot of programs like that.

So we've really focused on making sure that we're doing as many business plan competitions as we can getting to.

as many programs that we can that we can handle to get help, essentially.

@29:07 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

And folks, the reason I was asking about Business Accelerator, we created our own Business Accelerator program here in Oregon called Latino Founders.

So folks that may be unaware, Founders is a 501c3 nonprofit organization where a Business Accelerator, as well as a pitch competition.

So it's a 12-week Business Accelerator, we're bringing in different entrepreneurs, and they go through various processes. We talk about product market fit, talk about scale and operations.

We build a lot of connections, we build them either with venture capitalists or bankers, or you want to actually talk with an actual mentor, like you mentioned as well.

And the goal was really to kind of create this entrepreneurial community within our own Portland ecosystem because our economy is hurting, right?

Our community is also hurting. And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to help establish generational wealth, right?

Our goal for Latino Founders is to help a hundred Latino with in five years. So that's 20 Latinos a year, generate a million dollars in reoccurring revenue for their business.

So we truly want to actually scale them. And how are we doing that, right? Well, as Steven mentioned, going through a business accelerator program is one way we help them, right?

them connected with mentors, get them connected with lawyers, FDA trademarks, know, you name it, going down that line. And then also the pitch competition.

So we give them an opportunity, a platform to pitch their idea to community members and venture capitalists that are able to attend, pitch their idea.

And like now, now we actually give out funding. And these are these are grants. So you don't have to pay us back.

They're they're fully on you. You're given to him free, clear. We gave out over $35,000 last year, I believe it was.

And we're going to continue to do this here in the state of Oregon to really build a community that is self-sustaining, right?

Because again, the US economy is built on the backs of small business owners. so, How can we continue to create that synergy amongst not only our Latino community, but also the entrepreneurs just within our state.

The food and beverage is also one. you look across altitude, beverage is a former business accelerator program that was with us, bottles recently just opened their own brick and mortar because they won a $10,000 pitch Latino grant.

And they're able to own their brick and mortar, and now they're continuing to grow. So you're starting to see the synergy ballroom, which is going to be an app that I think will really be very innovative.

That's going to be coming out. Again, there's a lot of cool things are happening in the community. It's just kind of getting out there.

Now, you mentioned the biggest thing is you talk about networking.

@31:44 - Stephen Bone

How important has networking been to you? Absolutely essential. Every big opportunity that we've set up has been through networking, which a lot of pieces of that are asking for meetings with people and then asking for more

connections from them. So it can be really hard to say, hey, who can you connect me with? But when you ask people for specific connections to specific people, it makes it easier on them and just having the ask is really important.

Now, as you can say, like that competition and that program that you have, anybody who qualifies for that, they definitely go out there and apply for them.

Business playing competitions and accelerators are so valuable in terms of just feedback. We've had a lot of competitions. I just got denied into a finals for a business playing competition.

We have of the MIT Sloan Healthcare Innovation Challenge, something like that. do like, it was just interesting because when we go to these kind of competitions, we're like, legos for IV lines.

And there's lot of other people that are like, AI, you know? we're an interesting category in this space, but we just kind of trust the process.

We go in, we do our best. So we just didn't get into the finals, but we got a ton of feedback from being involved in that program.

So we actively are still looking for programs, looking for competitions to be able to get some more money. to get some more feedback, get connected, because when you're in those programs, those people are really open to help you out going forward.

So yeah, networking, making the ask, I think the biggest lesson that I've learned around networking is making it easy for the person to help you will increase your productivity.

So for us, when we're talking to somebody that could connect us with key nursing officers, patient safety leaders, ICU managers, making that really specific and saying, hey, can you connect to these people so I can talk to them about X?

Just making your ask more specific is a lot easier. I remember back in college when I was like, yeah, I'm looking for a bioengineering internship.

And I'm just like laughing at myself, making that ask to people, because it was so broad and unspecific, there's no way anybody could help me.

Whereas if back at that time I had asked for looking for specific internships in specific fields, and this is just a really specific, like, you know.

Back question around networking that I know I messed up on but making a making your  more specific and Easier for people to help you out makes networking a lot more efficient Yeah, and you know I I agree like one of the the power of networking is huge And I think yes folks you are gonna probably see a lot of like AI innovative, you know entrepreneur But at the end of the day product development is still there's still a lot of behind product development physical products, right?

@34:27 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Stephen's showing you one right here with with their product with the Crimson medical solution I think it's it's really something that is innovative and it's simple because I think it's gonna create a lot more patient safety In an area where patient safety is imperative because again, these are individuals are usually in the ICU as you mentioned And so I think I think it's something that's gonna be very important And then again going back to the networking thing folks if you're listening to anybody that's has a business accelerator program I'm happy to connect with you because I'm also trying to learn.

I also want to learn how you guys became like the MIT Sloan. reached out to those folks. I know one gentleman actually that went through one over in New York.

I'm like, hey, let me know how I can help, because I want to learn how you guys have been successful, so we can try to be successful here in our community.

I just want to share the knowledge. I hope this podcast for those listening is also a knowledge share for those, because again, my goal was to really provide some very valuable, valuable information.

Now, Stephen, for folks that are interested in learning more about you, maybe find out some more value information.

@35:31 - Stephen Bone

How do they contact with you? Website, socials, how can they get a hold of Easiest way would be over LinkedIn.

I'm most active on LinkedIn. I'm not really active, or I don't really go on any other social media consistently.

So the best way to be through LinkedIn or email, and my email is on my LinkedIn, or through our website for Crimson Medical Solutions, or our LinkedIn page for Crimson Medical Solutions.

@35:56 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Perfect, and folks, if you forget, all of that information. This is... Great time to plug the Shades of Entrepreneurship newsletter.

can subscribe at theshadesofe.com. We'll have all this information on the newsletter. You can also visit theshadesofe.com or you can visit our social sites at the Shades of E.

LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.

@36:18 - Stephen Bone

So go ahead and follow those and you can also stream this on YouTube. For those that want early access, you can become a patron member for $5 a month and you can actually get this video usually week before it airs.

Now, Stephen, is there anything else you'd like to say before we let the guests go? Well, I would just say if there's a student out there listening, I would just say keep going at it.

It's a really cool journey. love the things I get to do. Every time I'm running this trial, never something that I would expect it that I would be able to do or negotiating with manufacturers or being on a podcast or these are really, really cool opportunities and so it can be

really really difficult on the early stages of doing entrepreneurship early on, especially right out of college. But it's definitely worth it.

And it's definitely a lot of fun. And I'm excited for where this gave me.

@37:13 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I love it. And you get to meet new people every day, like every day, every day, some of you, I love it.

Stephen, thank you so much again for your time. Again, folks, that's Crimson medical solution to find out more. Please visit the shades of E.com and we'll have information on the website.

You can also visit it on follow us on the shades of E on TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Please follow us on subscribe on YouTube.

Thank you and have a great night. 

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