Russell Evans: [00:00:05] This is Contributors, a show exploring how today's Canadian business leaders are building a better future for Canada. Welcome back to Contributors. We've had a little bit of a summer break, but we are recording again and I couldn't be more excited to be back. I'm here, as always, with my friend and colleague Jade Towle. How are you, Jade?

Jade Towle: [00:00:25] I'm doing very well. It's nice to be back, speaking with more Canadian leaders after a lovely summer. 

Russell Evans: [00:00:34] It is. It's really great to be back. I've been looking forward to having these conversations again, and I think we have a particularly good one set up for today. Can you tell us a little bit about that? 

Jade Towle: [00:00:44] We do. So we actually have Dr. Brett Belchetz, to speak with you today, Russell. He is CEO and co-founder of Maple. Maple is an app that allows users to essentially access health care from the comfort of their own home or wherever they may be. And likewise, it allows doctors and other practitioners to log on and provide care. 

Russell Evans: [00:01:09] Maple is such an interesting organization, so I'm interested in learning from Brett. How does he feel about the Canadian health care system and does he feel like there is an opportunity for Maple to actually build on that system and make it better? 

Jade Towle: [00:01:26] Definitely. And if we're looking at, you know, some key takeaways for our listeners today, Brett is also going to share a little bit of insight into their shift to a B2B business model. So from what I understand, you know, this was something that they actually hadn't considered before, but they made that pivot and it's been very successful. 

Russell Evans: [00:01:47] Yeah, well, absolutely ask about that and really about innovation overall, because ultimately what Maple is doing is, above all else, extremely innovative. So let's get into it. 

Jade Towle: [00:01:58] Absolutely. Let's dive in. 

Russell Evans: [00:02:05] So Brett, welcome to Contributors. 

Brett Belchetz: [00:02:07] Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. 

Russell Evans: [00:02:09] It's great to have you on the show. We've really been looking forward to it. Why don't you start by telling us a little bit about yourself in your own words? 

Brett Belchetz: [00:02:17] I love practicing medicine and was very passionate in my career about helping patients, about alleviating strain from people and alleviating suffering for people in their moment of need. But what really struck me over the course of my years working in the emergency room is the degree to which access in our system has become a very, very large problem for many, many people. I would do my shifts day in and day out in the hospital, and there were many days where I would see people in the hospital who were waiting six hours, eight hours to see me. And a lot of the time they were coming in for for relatively minor issues that took four minutes of my time. And if you look at the stats across Canada's health care system, it's clear that about half the visits that are coming into our emergency rooms are what we call primary care visits. So visits that ordinarily you would think a family doctor would be seeing. But when I would ask these patients why they were coming into the emergency room, why they were waiting eight hours to see me, the answer always came back that people were doing this because they had nowhere else to go. They either didn't have a family doctor. And this is a problem that affects about one fifth of people in Canada or they had a family doctor and when they ask for an appointment, the soonest appointment they were able to get was weeks away. As we all know, the hospital waiting room is not a great place to be. Then, particularly when you're not feeling well, sitting in a waiting room hoping to get help, that's the last place that anybody wants to be. And for me, one of the things I think that really, really struck me quite deeply at the same time from about 2010 to 2014, and these are years in my career where smartphones started to become widely used. Everybody had an iPhone or an Android phone. And what I noticed is that my friends and family members, when they had medical problems, they weren't ever sitting in a waiting room for eight hours waiting to be seen. They just texted me and asked me what was wrong, and either I could solve their issue completely by text or we would jump on a quick face time video and we were able to solve their problem pretty quickly by video. And it struck me that two things. One, that this just really worked. I was able to really easily diagnose patients without physically touching them, and they would give me feedback afterwards to let me know that the diagnosis was right when eventually they ended up getting treatment. Or if they saw their doctor in person, they were always told me that I had it exactly right. They were really happy with the experience. And so all of that experience that I had over those years really led to the idea that there had to be a better way and the idea that what we've done in Maple was the way to actually solve for a better experience. I think what I take away from our existing health care system are large, publicly funded health care system is that it is all about, I would say, processing people and trying to get people through and most of the time, not very quickly, but it's about processing people because there are endless, limitless numbers of people to be processed. If we look at what's happening in in the typical emergency room, as I mentioned, about 50 percent of patients going into the emergency room in a typical hospital in Canada, these are patients that are not coming in for emergencies. They're coming in for primary care. 

Russell Evans: [00:05:17] One of the things that I was thinking about in advance of this interview is I think one of the key takeaways of COVID is trust the experts. And you hear a lot of talk around, we need to trust the experts, we need to trust in the evidence, we do trust science, etc.. 

Brett Belchetz: [00:05:31] If you really want to ask the experts, I would actually argue that the people that we should be asking are those people that are running health care systems in other countries and actually achieving much better results than we are. So if you look at almost the entirety of the world, so at least the developed world, if we look at countries like those in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, most of the Asian countries that are developed, almost every single one of them is outperforming Canada's healthcare system in terms of things like wait time, quality of care, satisfaction scores, even equity of access to care. And there's a number of things that they do differently in most of these systems than they do in the Canadian system. But instead of looking at those systems, we just ignore them and say, We're Canada. We have the best health care system in the world. Only when we look at our health care system, let's only look at the United States and say, well, at least we're not them. Because that that health care system has catastrophic problems due to the fact that it has no universal health care system. So if you don't have private insurance, you're basically out of luck and will have an awful outcome. So we look at that and we say, well, we're better than them, and that's all that matters. But meanwhile, around the rest of the world, in every single country, France, Germany, the UK, Netherlands, Japan, etc., all of these countries are doing things in a way that are costing those countries less. If you look at the amount of money they're spending on health care, it's typically less than what we spend and they're getting better outcomes. And none of them have this strange fixation on private versus public. Every single one of those countries has a great universal health care system like Canada's. They also have private health care. Nobody gets fussed about it. It doesn't suck all the doctors out of the public system. Most doctors work in both systems and you never see these issues. 

Russell Evans: [00:07:08] Tell us a little bit from the perspective of one of your customers. What is Maple? How does it work? How is it different than other companies that are operating in the same space? 

Brett Belchetz: [00:07:20] I think the best way to to describe to somebody contemplating using Maple is as we were trying to recreate that experience I described, which is my friends and family members were able to text me whenever they had a problem and get taken care of from their living room, their bedroom, wherever they were. We were trying to recreate that ease of access for everybody. So the idea is everybody in Canada should have the same experiences. If they had a friend or family member that was a doctor, that's a text message away. And when we started the company, the model that we tried to follow in terms of how do we actually build this platform. We were looking at different models of virtual care staffing, and there's a bunch of different ways that we thought about potentially doing this. And the model that we settled on is is very analogous to the way Uber does does ride sharing. And when we looked at the Uber ride sharing system, what was very apparent, at least at the time, was that there were two ways to do transportation at that time. There was shift based transportation, where there'd be a taxi driver sitting in their cab for eight hours and they'd be available to be called when you needed a ride. And then there was this idea that there would be more and more drivers and they would jump on and off as they were available and cumulatively you would get service from that big group. And what was very clear back when we started Maple was that Uber always had quicker speed of service than the taxi companies and typically actually better quality service as well. It was our hypothesis also, and this is based on my years of practice and also based on some Stats Canada numbers that a lot of doctors would be willing to staff this Uber like model, but wouldn't be willing to staff a shift based model. And if I go back to my years working as an emergency room doctor, what I found is I was working a full time set of shift, so I'd be working for an emergency room doctor about 16 to 17 shifts a month, and that was considered full time hours for an emergency room doctor because it's a very it's a very grueling job. And I often had this thought that I wish that I had an application or some way that I could see a few patients up, a few more people make a little bit more income without the obligation of sitting on a six hour shift that I can't walk away from. And so that was my personal experience. I vetted that with my colleagues. They all agreed that they felt the same way. And then when we looked at the Stats Canada numbers, what was really interesting was when we looked at the percentage of doctors that are working full year, full time, it turned out that less than 50 percent of Canada's doctors are actually working full year, full time. So most doctors were actually having our experience, which is that they were burned out from whatever their physical practice was. They were never going to give more hours to that physical practice, but they had spare time on their hands where they could do something else that wasn't going to be a harsh commitment for them. And so if we circle back to say, how does Maple work? Maple is essentially Uber for seeing primary care doctors. You log into the platform, you click to request the first available doctor. You enter in a few details about what's wrong with you and your request goes out into the universe of, we have several thousand doctors that are on the platform now, and right now we're servicing slightly over four million patients across Canada. So when we look at what we're doing in our in our application, nobody's on a shift, nobody's giving up their their physical clinic hours, their physical clinic shifts. Everybody is actually just providing more hours. So what we've done is we've expanded the capacity or the supply of hours of health care providers across the country by bringing in our application. So really different premise where we were trying to expand capacity versus steal it from the physical and move it to virtual. 

Russell Evans: [00:10:38] It's really interesting to hear that you have four million Canadians that you're supporting right now. I had no idea that you were that big. That's 10 percent. Is it on? The last I've read, we've got a country of 40 million. So if you got four, that's 10 percent of Canadians. Why aren't you a household name? That's huge. 

Brett Belchetz: [00:10:59] You know, I think we have a very large proportion of the Canadian population, as you mentioned, 10 percent that have access to the application. I think part of why we're not a household name is that if you look at the breakdown of where our patients are coming from, there's about a million and a half that are what we call our direct to consumer patients. So anybody off the street who would come in and say, I need to see a doctor and I will go through [00:11:22]Maple's flow [0.3s] and request one of the doctors coming in off the street. But about two and a half million of our patients that have access to the platform are coming in through what we call our B2B channels. So my employer funds access to Maple as part of my employee benefits. My insurer funds access to Maple as part of my insurance benefits. And so I think what we typically see in in all areas of the economy and not not just in our industry, but people that are accessing a brand through employee benefits or through B2B channels, typically there is a lot less brand awareness of those brands than you would typically see if it was all direct to consumers. 

Russell Evans: [00:12:01] That's interesting. I wanted to talk to you about that pivot. So pivoting not away from direct to consumer, but pivoting to also a B2B model, what made you decide to do that and what were some of the challenges? 

Brett Belchetz: [00:12:15] I'll be honest with you. When we started the company, the B2B model was something that we didn't even think of. We started the company and I was a physician, as I mentioned, by training and as a person who was not coming from working in business and had never started a company before, I was, as I said, very inspired by companies like Uber, and I got really excited looking at models like Airbnb. And all of these are our digital consumer brands. And so the thing that was the natural place to go starting a company was the direct to consumer type of offering. So we started Maple, we started the company in 2015. We launched to our first patients in 2016 and it launched purely as a direct consumer offering. And only about a year later, after a whole bunch of people who had used Maple and had great experiences were were recommending us onwards and who had we had sold lots of problems for only when those people started to ask us what our corporate plans were like because they liked the offering so much, they wanted to buy it for their company, and all we at that point did we realized, wait a second, we kind of missed the boat here on something because people love this. People want to be able to buy it in a group way for a group of people to have access to it. And we don't have any corporate offering. We don't have a B2B offering. So I think the market spoke to us and the market said to us, this is something that people really, really want to have. And so very quickly, in the year 2017, we built our B2B offering and started offering these corporate plans to people that were asking for them. And eventually we figured out how to have a sales team and and actually proactively start making the market aware of it. And the rest is history to the point where now about 70 percent of our business is is B2B. 

Russell Evans: [00:13:53] What did you learn, like, are there some bumps along the way that you had when you're dealing with B2B? Obviously, it's an intrinsically different business model and in that case you've got two customers, you've got the employer and then you still have that end user patient. 

Brett Belchetz: [00:14:06] Yeah, there's a lot of challenge along the way. You know, we've had bumps along the road in, you know, direct to consumer. We've had bumps along the way in B2B as well. I think one of the the struggles that you will always face and I think you hit the nail on the head when you referenced the fact that there are two customers, there's the patient and there's the employer. One of the struggles is that sometimes what an employer wants is not what a patient wants. There is there is a direct conflict between what each person is asking for it. So a great example would be a patient comes in that they are getting access through their employer. The patient comes in asking for a doctor's note for them to have a month off of work due to not feeling well. That circumstance is something where clearly were we to make the patient happy. We're going to make their employer really, really unhappy and make the employer happy and say, No, we're going to make the patient pretty unhappy. And there's there's lots of examples like that where somebody has a vested interest in what the outcome is. I think what has gotten us through all of that, and this remains true to this day, is that we as a company have a very clear philosophy, which is that we are much more interested in providing good health care, and we never tell the doctors how to practice medicine or what they should and shouldn't be doing. But we ask that they practice according to their professional guidelines. We ask that they follow the established standards of the profession, and we also have their peers evaluate them if there's ever a complaint. So there's a bunch of things that are happening outside of Maple as a company evaluating the practice of the doctors. But what we make very clear is that we will always prioritize good health care over having somebody who's happy at the end of the day. And most of the time you can do both. So a lot of the time, in most normal health care encounters, you can both have a very happy patient and provide good health care. Some of the stories that we receive from our patients are just unbelievably touching, just in terms of just the huge impact that we've had on people's lives in a positive way. 

Russell Evans: [00:16:06] I want to ask you about benefits providers. What is the value proposition for providers to partner with you? It seems like it would be more expensive than the alternative, which is just to send their people to the walk in clinic or the emergency room. There's a cost to Canada for that, of course, but there's not a cost the business. 

Brett Belchetz: [00:16:24] It's a great question. The reality is the time and the productivity of your employees is extraordinarily valuable. So if you look at the analysis that have been done, the average Canadian employee generates something along the order, the order of about 60 something dollars of productivity per hour. And that's the average. That's not higher paid employees. And that is certainly not for your most expensive part of the workforce. That's just the average number. But if we apply that average when your employee takes the day off of work because they have to take their kid to the doctor's office because they themselves have urinary tract infection and they spend their day at the walk in clinic and they feel very unwell because they spend five hours in a waiting room. And even when they come home after that time at the walk-in clinic, they now don't feel well enough to go back to work. When you're losing eight hours potentially of productivity, that is not free to you as a business. You're paying wages to this person. And that eight hours of productivity is $480. So $480 for for one visit to a health care facility in person. It is it is a very expensive loss of productivity to the typical business. And when we think about not only the productivity of what's being lost, but the disruption to the organization. Now we have to figure out how do we actually make it through the day. And there's disruption. There's breakdowns in in your normal processes, in your environment. And all this can become very costly and sometimes lead to bad outcomes for the employer themselves, customers or their operations. Most employers in Canada spending several hundred dollars per employee per month on benefits for drug coverage, dental and all that kind of stuff. So this this is something that is is vastly cheaper. So typically, depending on where these benefits are being paid for. If it's through an insurer, through an employer, typically you're looking at something that's a few dollars a month. So you're looking at something that per employee in your organization, you're spending about 40, 50 dollars a year, maybe less, depending on the size of you as an organization. If each time somebody uses this service, it's going to save you almost $500 in lost productivity. There's a very, very clear argument to you as an employer that you should be paying for this. There is a very, very powerful ROI every single time this is used. 

Russell Evans: [00:18:26] Yeah, I love that. And I think that's that's a really innovative way to look at it. I think one of the things that came to mind when you were describing all that is as a head salesman from Greenfield, Canada. So he's been a Contributors guest, and in a very similar way he's looked at his service to say, you know, I'm not a benefits provider. We are actually here to solve the underlying issues. He's really that that organization's really approaching employee benefits in a very different way, looking not to process the payments, but to solve the issues and tying it to just, as you said, productivity, retention, recruitment. I would say as well, this is really how we at CAAT are looking at our offering. So we're offering defined benefit pensions to employers across Canada of every size of every sector, and we're tying it again to productivity to engagement, to retention, to recruitment. Saying this is not an expense. This is an investment. 

Brett Belchetz: [00:19:29] I love that you mentioned all those things because there are so many things that employers are funding, that are all about how do we make our employees happier? How do we make them healthier? How do we make them more satisfied that this is a good place to work? I've never heard anybody questions an employer why do you find a coffee machine at work? I've never heard somebody say, that's a waste of money. Show me the ROI on the coffee machine. The reason why we spend money to have the coffee machine in the snack station in the office is because we recognize that that is creating an engaging environment where the employees are happy, where they feel that they're supported, whether the employer cares about them. I'm sure the coffee is making you healthier, but we're not trying to evaluate in its entirety the economic output of that coffee machine. That's what they stay with us, that they're more engaged. They're more productive. They care more about the success of the company because they feel the company cares about them. All of these are things never mind that direct productivity numbers that I spoke about, but all of these are are things that are very difficult to measure but are possibly even orders of magnitude greater in terms of that the ROI that you get on a relatively small incremental benefit spend. 

Russell Evans: [00:20:35] So Contributors has a listenership that's really a lot of business leaders across Canada. Many of whom are in the c-suite. And they may be listening to this interview right now thinking, okay, well, I'm not in health care, that's not my business. But I feel like Brett might have knowledge and insights on innovation and on transforming business models. So my question to you would be, what advice would you have for those Canadian business leaders outside of health care? 

Brett Belchetz: [00:21:04] I think there's a few pieces of advice I would give. So so first of all, I always take advice with a grain of salt. That's my first piece of advice, because advice may or may not apply to your business. But once you've taken that big grain of salt, I think there's a few things that I would take away from our journey. One is that if you really want to do something transformational and so I'm not talking about incremental change, I'm talking about transformational change. And I've seen a lot of businesses that have innovation labs or invest in innovation in some other form where most of what comes out of those labs is typically incremental changes are small adaptations of the business model, not fundamental changes. But if you really want to do something transformational in any industry, you have to expect a ton of resistance. It doesn't matter what industry you are in, the powers that be, the forces that exist within that industry are going to think that you're transformationally radically different idea of doing things is either dead wrong, it's ineffective, it's unsafe, it's dangerous. There's going to be a chorus of voices that are aligned against you, and you just have to expect that. So don't ever let all of those voices that are telling you why it's a terrible idea. If you're pretty convinced it's a great idea, don't let that stop you. And I've seen so many businesses that because of the kind of resistance you face to transformational change, they never, ever have that transformational change. You know, there's you know, we look at the story of blockbuster video in the era of Netflix and we look at BlackBerry, when iPhone came out. Lots of businesses that probably could have had transformational change but were too afraid to ever be transformational because there were so many voices telling them that it was a bad idea. So if you want to be that transformational entity, you have to take chances. And we all know when the iPhone first came out, people ridiculed it. There were a lot of people that liked it, but there were [00:22:49]labels. [0.0s] That is a really dumb idea. Nobody's going to want to tape on a virtual keyboard. And you didn't see that stopping Apple from coming out with that idea. We were told, as I mentioned over and over again, that our business was wrong and many other things and that didn't stop us. So that's one. Two, when you're getting feedback on on the things that you're trying to do, it's really important to look at who the feedback is coming from. So there is for any industry and for any company. There is a customer set that you care about and there is a potential group of people that are not the customers you care about. And what you need to figure out when you're looking at a potential thing that you're looking to do to transform, to innovate, again, you're going to hear a lot of objections as to why it's the right idea or the right path to take. You always have to look at where that's coming from. Is this coming from the people who really matter for your business? So if the stakeholders that really matter, the customers you really care about and the ones who have actually tried this new innovation, because that's a really important thing. If they're the ones saying really bad idea, don't do this, then probably don't do it. But a lot of the time when you dig in on on objections to innovation, what you'll find is the people that are objecting have either never tried your innovation or they're not your core customer group, or they're people that would never have even worked with your business altogether but they love doing anything to impede the success of your business. So what you need to do is learn to tune out the voices that don't matter and only listen to those ones that do matter. The level of resistance. Not only is it something that you can't let that stop you. I would actually argue that if you don't hear that, if you come up with an idea and nobody is telling you this is a terrible idea or a scary idea or a threatening idea, it's probably not about not all that innovative because anything that is truly innovative going to threaten somebody. So look out for that, because often that is a sign that you're on to something. And then I think the final thing that I would say is that. You cannot waste your energies when you're innovating on persuading the persuadables. So I mentioned there are going to be some people who like what you're doing and some people that don't. Double down on making the people that matter happy. And don't ever waste your energies on trying to persuade those people that it doesn't matter what you do, they will not support you. And, you know, in our business, we've seen that you know, we've seen, as I mentioned, 60 percent of the Canadian population really likes this idea of of, you know, innovation and and private companies such as ourselves being involved in health care. And the other 40 percent really don't like what we do. And how do we focus our energies on on how do we persuade that 40 percent of the population to like us? I don't think we ever would have succeeded. And instead we kind of said, yeah, we get it. You don't like us. We're not going to listen to you. We're not going to talk to you. We're going to talk to the other 60 percent that are persuadable. And all of our energies went into how do we get that other 60 percent speaking to us and using our product? And that, I think, was a very effective recipe for success versus a lot of wasted energy and resources. 

Russell Evans: [00:25:47] One of the questions we love to ask when we interview business leaders at Contributors is what we call the secret sauce question. So in this case, I usually reach out to people that are in my network or friends of friends who know the CEO I'm talking to and I say, What's this person's secret sauce? And in your case, I got a really interesting answer. So in your case, the answer that I got was that you had really evolved as a leader since starting Maple and that you've shown kind of an openness to continue to evolve and specifically evolve in a more collaborative way. And I thought that was interesting because I thought if there's if there's something that, you know, we assume it's that tech founders are not super collaborative. They tend to be people who are very decisive. You know, we imagine that they have this firm view of where they want to go in this big vision. And what I heard about you, actually, is that you were as an emergency room doctor, but that's not who you are as a business leader. Can you tell us more about that? 

Brett Belchetz: [00:26:53] That's a, it's a really interesting statement and a really interesting piece of feedback. I think it's very true. When you're working as an emergency room doctor, there, there is a room for a lot of debate in what you're doing. So, so I would go into shift and essentially my entire job was to have a very clear idea of what was going on in any given situation, give the orders and know that the orders were going to get carried out. And and there was no room for debate. There was no room for questioning. There was no room for creativity. It was just act as a general, make sure that that the troops get the job done. And in that setting, everybody actually really valued that. In a business setting, that doesn't work at all, or at least it didn't work in our business setting. I would say that, as you've mentioned, there are some business leaders that are, you know, full of, I would say, this unitary idea of what should be done in any certain circumstance. And they are the the dictatorial type of business leaders. And I think for some of them that that has worked out to some extent. You know, obviously Steve Jobs is a great example in that there are others who have done that. But but unless what I would actually say is and I like to as I like to think about everything in what I call a two by two matrix. So so if I think about this in a two by two matrix, there's sort of on what access is your, your degree of creative brilliance and on your other access is your degree of authoritarianism. And so what I would say is if you're very authoritarian but also very creatively brilliant, which is probably where Steve Jobs has been, you can succeed. And I would actually I would say if I were to put myself in a slot on that axis, I'd say definitely not the Steve Jobs kind of brilliance. Like, you know, I think what I came up with was I mean, that was just a logically, clearly a good idea, but it wasn't like an iPhone that nobody had ever dreamed of before in this universe. So you have to be more of the person that is collaborative versus dictatorial. Because what's going to happen is when you work in an organization, what's going to make it succeed is you've got an idea of where you want to go. But what's going to make it succeed is having everybody rally around you and all the things that that coming into this business I didn't know how to do. So I didn't know how to market and I didn't know how to build an H.R. function. And I didn't know how to build a finance function. I didn't know much more than I did know. I had subject matter expertise, which is on health care. But I didn't know the rest of, you know, building a tech business. The most important thing for us to succeed was for everybody else to contribute their expertise and their knowhow. And for me to actually, you know, soak it all up and actually listen to the people that really knew what they were talking about in these different areas and had them enthusiastically feel like they were the torchbearer for this mission as well. And that, I think, is what allowed us to succeed. But I will say it was a hard transition because in the early days of the company when we first got started, I came from that emergency room general like attitude. 

Russell Evans: [00:29:33] That's great. This show, as you know, is called Contributors. And the show exists to talk to CEOs and businesses that are contributing to a better future for Canada. So how is Maple contributing to a better future for Canada? 

Brett Belchetz: [00:29:48] I think health care is probably one of the most pressing issues that our country faces. We're in a place where one fifth of Canadians don't have a family doctor. And even those who do a family doctor, one third of them wait more than seven days to get appointment. We have hospitals closing across the country. If you looked at what happened during the peak of respiratory illness at the end of 2022, the health care system was very close to the brink of collapse across many parts of the country. So this is a huge stress point and it's not going to get better. It's going to get worse because our population is aging, our population is growing. We need a lot of help. And Maple, I would say, is one of the few, I'd say bright points in terms of what's happening in this health care system. You know, we've taken within this system where access is just so constrained and so difficult for so many people. Right now we've given four million people in Canada access to 24/7 care in a few minutes. If I fast forward going forward, if we can get the other 90 percent of the population on our application, the fact that we take an existing pool of doctors and we make them supply way more capacity than they were ever going to supply without our application. We lower wait times for everybody. We make health care accessible to everybody in their homes. I think this is something that without any doubt is creating a happier, healthier future for Canada. This is a massively impactful innovation for this country. 

Russell Evans: [00:31:09] Well, thank you so much for being on Contributors today, Brett. It was a pleasure meeting you and talking to you. 

Brett Belchetz: [00:31:14] My pleasure. Thank you again for having me. 

Jade Towle: [00:31:21] Okay, so we have a lot to unpack with that conversation, Russell. From innovation to pivoting from the business to consumer to business to business model. What are your thoughts about your conversation just now with Brett? 

Russell Evans: [00:31:36] So it was really educational for me. There's a lot that I didn't know about Maple going in that I came out knowing. And I think if I had one key takeaway, it was really about how different Maple is from other similar health care related startups. And that's really around the idea that what they've done is they've actually created net new capacity within the health care system, pretty much from nothing. Right. And one of the things I was thinking about is, are there other businesses, are there other industries outside of health care that could do something like this, that could create that capacity effectively out of nowhere and how transformative that could be for their businesses? So that was kind of my key takeaway. I thought that was super cool, and I think that's a competitive advantage for that business. You know, they talk about CEOs managing by walking around, managing by just learning what their teams are doing. There's no better way to manage an organization like Maple than to actually still be a doctor. 

Jade Towle: [00:32:44] So true. You know, I have to think of our CEO at CAAT Pension Plan, Derek Dobson, like he is in the trenches, as it were, with us. Right. And talking to employers every day and really seeing the impact that makes. And so if you're not walking it, how are you supposed to impact your business and support a model that's actually going to help the end customer? 

Russell Evans: [00:33:09] Yeah, he's he's great at walking the talk. I actually had a meeting with him yesterday and we were talking about a challenge we're having. And his solution to me was, well, have you thought about getting on some calls with the service delivery team so you have a better handle for the kinds of questions that come in from our members? So that's exactly his philosophy and he encourages the rest of us to do the same thing. I think the other thing that really stuck with me from the Brett conversation was when he talked about innovation. When he talked about the fact that you're going to have resistance and you need to really lean in on that resistance if you're doing something that's truly innovative. And it's interesting because he comes from a consulting background, and so often when you're trying to innovate, even if you're working with great consultants like McKinsey, you end up with incremental innovation. And incremental innovation often can be something that is not super controversial that we can all agree. Yeah, let's try that. [00:34:10]Let's deep it down [0.0s] . And yet, if you want to do something that's truly innovative, you're going to get detractors. You're going to get people who say that's not going to work. We shouldn't do that. And effectively, it's his philosophy that if you don't have detractors, you're not pushing hard enough. 

Jade Towle: [00:34:27] Very true. And I think that's sort of what makes a perfect formula for a visionary leader to be able to take that risk and want to make those moves. 

Russell Evans: [00:34:37] The final thing that I want to call that was there was a really interesting callback to our conversation with Zahid at GreenShield Canada. It's the idea of prioritizing the wellness of employees such that they can be more productive, such that they can be happier at work, such that they are feeling more engaged, more likely to stay with you, more likely to help you recruit new employees. And it really to me demonstrates a bit of a paradigm shift in employee benefits that it used to be around how can we administer employee benefits as efficiently as possible? And now increasingly it's around how do we make employee benefits matter not just to individual employees, but how do we make them matter to the culture of the business that is offering them? 

Jade Towle: [00:35:32] That's a really great comment, Russell. And if I may, I'd like to do a little plug on our lessons from the leaders e-book. So this is a complimentary e-book. We've compiled a whole list of insights and tangible takeaways from our different guests on the show. You can download it on Contributorspodcast.ca and we'll put it right in the show notes as well. 

Russell Evans: [00:35:57] Indeed they can. We've got Zahid in there. Dr. Susan Black. 

Jade Towle: [00:36:01] That's right. 

Russell Evans: [00:36:02] Victor Dodig from CIBC. And the list goes on. So please download it if you have it. In the meantime, thank you so much for listening to this episode. We hope you tune in again soon and have an excellent day from Jade and myself. 

Jade Towle: [00:36:18] See you later.

Russell Evans: [00:36:23] Thank you for listening to Contributors. The podcast for Canadian Leaders. We hope you'll take away some valuable insights and lessons from today's conversation. To help us reach even more listeners, please subscribe, rate and review Contributors on Apple Podcasts. If you'd like to learn more about CAAT, visit us at CAATPension.ca.