Joining Matt on this week's episode is Cara Osborne, Assistant Professor within the Walton College in the Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Venture and Innovation Department. Cara is also the founder and Chief Clinical Officer at Baby+Co, founder at Blaize & Brooks Bourbon, owner of the Butcher Rose bed and breakfast and a former nursing professor for the University of Arkansas. In the episode Cara highlights her entrepreneurial journey and her use of human centered design/design thinking when it comes to developing a company and product.
Episode Transcript
Cara Osborne 0:00
Don't be afraid to look around and explore and try a few things on and see what fits
and make the decision that's right for you at the time.
Matt Waller 0:11
Excellent, professionalism, innovation and collegiality. These are the values the
Sam M. Walton College of Business explores in education, business and the lives of
people we meet every day. I'm Matt Waller, Dean of the Walton College, and welcome
to the be epic podcast. I have with me today, Professor Cara Osborne. She's in the
Walton College department of strategy, entrepreneurship and venture innovation. We
call it SEVI for short. She's also been a nursing professor at the University of Arkansas,
which is quite unusual to have a nursing professor moved to the College of Business.
She is co founder of Baby and company. And she is also co founder of a bourbon company
and a bed and breakfast. But thank you, Cara, for being willing to do this podcast
recording with me.
Cara Osborne 1:09
Sure, thanks so much for having me.
Matt Waller 1:12
Cara, you have a really unusual educational background, where you majored in Biology.
You got a master's in nursing, from Vanderbilt. And you also have a Doctorate in Public
Health. And you got your Doctorate in Public Health in 2007. At what point did you
start getting involved in entrepreneurship?
Cara Osborne 1:40
For me, entrepreneur always seemed like a strange sort of moniker. And so I've always
thought of it really as a problem solver, solving problems with business solutions.
And I would say that I got involved in the problem solving part since I was a kid.
I was on the like, future problem solving team at school, you know, the like academic
team that looked at big problems. And that was always a really appealing thing to
me. But my first real entrepreneurial venture myself was in 2013. And it was really
a translational research project, it was taking academic work that I had done and
making it real.
Matt Waller 2:19
What was that company called?
Cara Osborne 2:22
Baby and Company. So it started as birth center of Northwest Arkansas, it was in Rogers
and was a freestanding birth center, I had published a paper called the National Birth
Center study, that was a huge cross sectional study of birth outcomes and freestanding
birth centers looking at sort of both the safety and maternal and infant health outcomes,
but also the cost effectiveness of non hospital birth. And so the birth center is
really saying like, this all looks good on paper, but can it be done? And what does
it look like to do it in a place like Arkansas?
Matt Waller 2:59
Then you formed baby and company in 2014? Correct?
Cara Osborne 3:04
Right. So we teamed up with some private equity guys in New York from a group called
Fortress Investment Group that's now been sold this off Bank of Japan, but it was
a part of their partners fund. And they came alongside and said, this seems like a
great thing. And interestingly, they got interested in maternal health, because when
the Affordable Care Act came out, also known as Obamacare, right, when that happened,
they'd done a review of where their primary health care expenditures were. And their
employee base was largely pretty young, pretty healthy people. And so maternity care
was their top spend, as it is for a lot of companies. So they started looking around
at innovative solutions found us and so then we replicated what we had done in Arkansas,
six or seven more times, depending on how you want to count them in five other states.
Matt Waller 3:59
Didn't you come back then to the University of Arkansas School of Nursing?
Cara Osborne 4:03
I did so I had a five year commitment with them after we sold the concept as the Chief
Clinical Officer for the sort of expanded baby and company platform. And then the
business was largely based in New York, I wasn't about to move my little kids full
time to New York, even though I was spending a lot of time there. So it had always
been my intention to sort of do that and then come back and I came back to the nursing
school and reengaged there and then really worked my way toward the newly forming
SEVI department to sort of put that experience of having started and sold the business
into practice.
Matt Waller 4:43
Well, that's great. You know, you talk about you don't think of it as entrepreneurship
but problem solving and it's so true. You know, because entrepreneurs are always looking
at problems and saying how can we create a product or service that solves this problem.
You know, one big challenge with that always is morphing your solution to the problem
to the point that customers really want it.
Cara Osborne 5:10
Yeah.
Matt Waller 5:11
Would you mind speaking a little bit to that with baby and company how that process
worked?
Cara Osborne 5:16
Sure. So I'm a big fan of human centered design, and the guy's out at the D school
at Stanford and audio and sort of starting from not my problem, but whatever the problem
of my intended user is, and working backwards. So it's true of many entrepreneurs.
But I was really solving the problems of mad like friends and family who had had really
unfortunate birth experiences and listening to them talk about what was bad, and what
could have been different and sort of working from what their wants and needs, and
sort of mismanaged care was backward into a solution.
Matt Waller 5:57
And then, of course, once you come to that point of getting what they call product
market fit, you know, a lot of people say you can tell when you got it, because customers
start pulling you and you get product market fit, but then you many times still have
to modify the business model
Cara Osborne 6:16
For sure.
Matt Waller 6:17
Did you experience that at baby and company as well?
Cara Osborne 6:21
Certainly, certainly. And you know, health care, because it's so heavily regulated,
and it's triangulated. Right, if a third party payer, with health insurance companies,
we had to make all kinds of tweaks along the way both to fit within the payment environment.
Because if you've got a solution that works, and customers don't want it, but it doesn't
make money, that's a hobby. So we had to figure out ways to make the actual business
model work, which ended up being, you know, a joint venture with hospitals, in some
markets, we often offered both birth center based birth and also hospital birth, so
they could have prenatal care in the birth center, and still ultimately deliver the
baby in the hospital. You know, it started with nurse midwives, leading most of the
care, we ultimately created options for patients to choose a midwife or a physician,
or both. So yes, there were lots of twists and turns and pivots along the way to make
the business model work.
Matt Waller 7:25
So you saw the problem, it was pretty personal to you, you knew people that had it,
you used a design, thinking kind of D school kind of an approach to the solution,
that solution, then you got product market fit, it's easier to get product market
fit when you use a design thinking approach, because you're getting input from some
of the people that would use the service. And then you adjusted your business model
as you started moving forward, to make it work and to make money.
Cara Osborne 7:59
Yeah.
Matt Waller 7:59
And then the next thing that comes up usually is if you're lucky, you scale the business.
And that's really tricky, too. These are all very different in terms of how they're,
they're tricky. But at that point, the challenge, then is if you want to scale it
up, you need people, you need processes and technology and you need capital. So tell
me a little bit about how that worked with baby and company.
Cara Osborne 8:25
Yeah, and it all happened really quickly. So we started the first center here in Arkansas,
and six months later, it was acquired, and we started replicating. So it was all super
fast. And the way that worked was relationships, you know, the as soon as it started
sort of getting traction, and it was very much a pull experience of we started working
and there was more demand, both in terms of potential hospital partners and actual
patients than we could possibly meet. And we started looking at other markets. I had
been the user and I'd also been the provider, I'm a nurse midwife, by initial clinical
training. So you know, had been in the personal experience of both the provider and
the patient in that scenario, which helped me kind of play different parts and roles
as we were thinking through how to do things. But, you know, as is often the case,
I started recruiting people that I'd worked with, in other places, a woman that I
had initially worked with years before at the Clinton Foundation's HIV and AIDS Initiative,
who had pretty recently finished her MBA at Harvard Business School became our COO.
We recruited a lot of midwives. I ended up helping develop an EHR because there wasn't
something off the shelf that worked for us. Sarah had a little
Matt Waller 9:50
What is an EHR?
Cara Osborne 9:51
An electronic health record. So the actual health record, because I had a little bit
of programming experience from my doctoral program, I couldn't use the EHRs that were
available. So we ended up writing a whole tech solution with a partner and sort of
co-developing the technology. So yeah, I had no idea when I got started that I would
need to learn so many things.
Matt Waller 10:18
One of the things I really like about this interview is students listen to this from
all different disciplines, not just in the Walton College. And this shows the benefit
of this minor that we're providing. Right, because we've got a minor in entrepreneurship
that's open to anyone on campus, doesn't matter what your major is. But it's probably
worth getting to know a little bit about entrepreneurship, before you get into whatever
you're getting into. Because no matter what you go into, you're actually in business.
Cara Osborne 10:50
That's right.
Matt Waller 10:51
And no matter what you go into, you're going to observe problems. And when you observe
problems, some of those problems are going to be opportunities to start your own business
at some point, or buy an existing business, and then modify it to address whatever
the problem is. But you've gone through all these different steps yourself, we now
have this minor in entrepreneurship that anyone can take. And I think that sometimes
people will major in something they may graduate, and think, gosh, I wish I would
have had more business.
Cara Osborne 11:25
Yeah, well, you're given a great pitch for the course that I teach called Intro to
venture and value creation. So it's kind of the gateway drug, or at least that's how
I like to think about it for people to come, you know, learn more about entrepreneurship
as the sort of toolbox to go alongside whatever your underlying discipline might be.
So a deep ginger adventure and value creation for undergrads. We've got people from
all kinds of disciplines and a lot of business students, but we talk about intrapreneurship,
corporate innovation, social entrepreneurship, so solving big problems with often
not for profit solutions, and then direct entrepreneurship sort of set of exercises
about sort of more stereotypical startup experience, but then they can kind of pursue
which ever fits their needs and interests most. But I also teach a class for the occupational
therapy doctoral students, where I teach them that in fact, no matter what version
of occupational therapy they're doing, they're also doing business and what that means
to them and how things like ICD 10 codes are going to apply to their practice in a
way that programs that are focused on training, healthcare professionals often just
don't have that content, you know, you have to kind of learn it on the job after you've
taken your first job. And I think I give a lot of credit to Sherry Muir the program
director who wrote it into the curriculum, because she felt like it was important
for her students. But yes, I would very much say that entrepreneurship training applies
to whatever it is you're going to do.
Matt Waller 13:09
How is it different to be a business professor compared to being a nursing professor?
Cara Osborne 13:14
Well, it's a lot more diverse in all the ways in the students, in the thinking, in
the you know, topics that I cover, in nursing school, you know, high stakes, often
taught pathophysiology, which is one of the toughest courses in the curriculum, it's
very tense. The part that I love about what I do now is it's all very creative. And
I'm teaching the students that they are creative, even if they don't think of themselves
as creative. And that creativity is a muscle that you exercise and grow just like
your actual physical muscles. And I use the book creative confidence that the two
brothers who started Ideo wrote, and that is what's so engaging and interesting for
me. So it's different every time because we use whatever the problems that the class
comes up with as our sort of fuel for learning the process. And I'm really just teaching
them process that can be applied to whatever problem they run into, and sort of variations
on a theme of problem solving. How do you solve it inside an existing structure? How
do you start something? And how do you look at big social problems from an entrepreneurial
lens?
Matt Waller 14:32
Kara, you're a professor of practice and entrepreneurship here in our college. And
since you have been a professor here, you've started a business called Blaize and
Brooks Bourbon.
Cara Osborne 14:47
Yes.
Matt Waller 14:48
Would you mind talking a little bit about how you got into that business and then
how it helps you from a teaching perspective?
Cara Osborne 14:55
Sure. So I've always been a practitioner of some sort. So when I taught in the nursing
school, I had a practice and my practice was as a nurse midwife. And now my practice
is as an entrepreneur. So as a professor of practice, it's really saying, I'm teaching
from a place of doing it myself. So I think that working in startups and advising
startups and starting things myself is necessary for me to really be able to speak
with any credibility to the process and to how students can think about the process.
So at the beginning of the pandemic, for the first time in my life I got homesick.
I grew up in Eastern Kentucky. I haven't lived in Kentucky since I was in undergrad,
but Kentuckians tend to take our bourbon, bluegrass music and horses really seriously.
So at the beginning of the pandemic, when all the sudden I didn't have soccer tournaments,
every weekend, I got really deeply interested in bourbon, mostly because of a book
called Women in Whiskey written by a guy named Fred Minnick. That sort of traced the
untold part of the history of whiskey surviving through prohibition through the lens
of the women that were involved. And so I went very deep down that rabbit hole and
decided to start using starting a new bourbon brand as a case study in class. I was
teaching the upper level entrepreneurship class 3933 then and I started using this
case study of, if you were attempting to start a bourbon brand, what would that look
like? And we would use it as something that, you know, is a hard good that has a cost
of goods and was a little more tangible than my previous healthcare experience. And
so we just started sort of messing with it and working with it through classes, not
even always as a bourbon, but just as a project and a product and branding, and what
would that look like? And it sort of kept evolving, and then I had free time, which
is dangerous. And I just started doing it. I started having conversations, I started
interviewing people for my class, I do a series of entrepreneur interviews with people
who've started things. And I just started asking people like, what they knew about
it. So it was a very organic kind of thing. And in the summer, after that, my husband
and I got married, and we didn't have a wedding. So we decided to start the bourbon
business as our sort of celebration of getting married, which is not the way everybody
does it. But he's a m&a attorney. And so that became our little project. And we jokingly
said, we were gonna make booze not babies, because we both already had children. And
so it's been great. It's been a very interesting project. Our MVP launched last year
at the derby. So the first weekend in May of 2021, and has been very successful. It's
exceeded all of our expectations. And out of that came the bed and breakfast, which
is in Louisville, it's kind of the the home of the bourbon business being right there
in bourbon country and on the Bourbon Trail. And it's a historic home, it really became
about putting that homesickness into place. It was built in 1795, when George Washington
was still president, and was a very male dominated history of the property in the
house. And so it's called the butcher rose, and we are using it as a, we've called
it a lady's first social house. But basically, it's designed from a specifically feminine
perspective, to host social things. We call it our old Kentucky home and yours too,
if you want it to be.
Matt Waller 18:55
That's a really neat story. So Cara, you have a lot of experience in higher education,
both as a student, undergraduate and masters and doctorate as a professor in two very
different areas. What advice would you give to students, especially undergraduates,
at the University of Arkansas, or in any university, in business or outside of business?
Cara Osborne 19:21
Yeah, I mean, I have a whole house full of teenagers. So I think about this a lot
right now, in addition to my students, but I think what I would tell anybody student
or not a student is don't be afraid to look around and explore and try few things
on and see what fits and make the decision that's right for you at the time. You can
always change your mind. You know, I definitely saw lots of students in the nursing
school and I myself was pre med, who kind of come in to the university with a life
plan that is, I'm going to be a doctor or I'm going to be a lawyer and and often have
a hard time giving themselves the room to critically evaluate that plan and sort of
look at what the other options are. You know, turns out there are all kinds of things
that one can do with one's time. And let that evolve as new opportunities come along.
And, you know, don't be afraid to stay flexible with your sort of self concept and
identity. Because it turns out that as long as you're open, and willing, you know,
all kinds of interesting things will float across your path, and you just have to
be willing to be open to the change and think about it differently.
Matt Waller 20:41
Well Cara, thank you so much for serving as a faculty member in the Walton College
and for all the great things you're doing for students and the community. And most
of all, thank you for taking time to share this on the podcast. I appreciate it.
Cara Osborne 20:58
Well thanks again for having me. And I'd be more than happy to hear from anybody if
there are follow up questions.
Matt Waller 21:05
On behalf of the Sam M. Walton College of Business. I want to thank everyone for spending
time with us for another engaging conversation. You can subscribe by going to your
favorite podcast service and searching be epic. B E EP IC
