Paradigm Shift

Gene Groys was hosting a dinner party at his Moreland Hills home in 2006 when StaffKnex was conceived. “You know,” said a friend who ran a nursing home, “I think I have the next great idea for you.”

Nursing homes — as well as many other businesses, of course — rely on shift workers. When they call off, it takes time to find a replacement. Typically, it’s either an administrator or a nurse making those phone calls. That time adds up, and workers calling off can take away from patient care, open up regulatory issues and increase overtime costs.

“If you can automate that,” the dinner guest said, “you can solve a huge problem.”

A few months later, StaffKnex was founded by Groys, who serves as senior vice president, and

W. Matthew Wilson, who serves as chief technology officer. Both men formerly worked for American Greetings.

This is how it works: For $3 to $6 a month per employee, a company can sign on with StaffKnex to automatically solve scheduling problems. When an employee calls off, the company’s scheduler notes it on StaffKnex. The program then finds employees who are not already working and are qualified to take the shift. A message is sent to those employees via e-mail, text message or voice mail. If they’re interested, an employee can accept the shift by following voice prompts, e-mailing or texting back.

Wilson, who created the software, describes it as “building smarts” into text messaging. “We were using text messaging in a very 20th century way,” he says. And while that’s how most of us still use SMS communication, StaffKnex has taken it to the next level.

“If you think about all the manual things a person would do, we’ve automated all those responses,” says StaffKnex CEO Mark Woodka, an angel investor who Groys jokes was “talked into” joining the company in 2008. StaffKnex also tracks hours and has the capability to send open shift notices to employees who are not accumulating overtime first. Woodka estimates this can reduce a company’s overtime costs by 25 to 50 percent.

Evergreen Manor Rehabilitation and Nursing Care in Montpelier, Ohio, was one of the first places to use StaffKnex. Terry Schollmeier, the home’s administrator, says he was “a little bit hesitant” when Groys approached him.

But after using StaffKnex for eight months, he says, it “has more than paid for itself.” Before using the program, Evergreen had a scheduler who worked about 30 hours a week. Nursing homes operate 24 hours a day, however, and shifts often need to be filled when the scheduler is not there. The responsibility often falls to one of the nurses.

“That’s a highly paid individual you wouldn’t want to have involved,” Schollmeier says. “[StaffKnex] allows them to handle that situation with the click of a mouse.”

The system has cut Schollmeier’s overtime costs in half. He has even had months where he paid no overtime at all. “It was like a hallelujah,” he says, “a pretty rare moment.”

StaffKnex spent its first year at Cuyahoga Community College’s Corporate College. (The company is now based on the top floor of the Keith Building in PlayhouseSquare.)

“It was really a great place for a startup company,” Groys says. The facilities were ideal for meeting with investors, and the price was right —“very, very low,” says Groys.

Being in Northeast Ohio has been an advantage as well. “The environment is just really conducive to startups,” Woodka says.

“If you’re doing something cool and interesting, you can be a destination company,” he says, a place where highly skilled and motivated employees want to work.

While other staff response management systems exist, Woodka says, they only use e-mail, which gives StaffKnex an advantage. “It hasn’t been a crowded market by any standard,” he says.

A StaffKnex marketing study shows that, of the top 50 nursing home chains in the country, only one currently uses any kind of scheduling software. What’s more, the three states with the highest percentage of nursing homes are Texas, California and Ohio.

Yet things have been done the old-school way for so long, nursing home administrators sometimes can’t see their own inefficiencies. “It really was like opening up a brand new market,” Woodka says. He found that his chorus became, “Let me tell you, thereisa better way to get things done.”

The company has 10 employees, and in the next five years, the goal is to grow to a $30 million company. StaffKnex is focused on nursing homes for now, with plans to expand outside that market in the future. Other segments of health care (such as hospitals) would come first, followed by new markets such as public safety and food service.

So far, life as entrepreneurs has been good. “I’m a very ADD individual,” says Groys. “Working in a corporate environment was very difficult, because I had a lot of ideas.”

As for Woodka, it’s a way of life. “I’ve always done early-stage companies, and that’s really what excites me.”

For Wilson, it was a new experience — one that he did not go into without some degree of fear. He told himself, “I’m not going to get the skills to get to the next stage of life unless I belly-flop into this.”

The worst part, thankfully, is in the past. “Going without a paycheck for a year,” laughs Groys. “I think you have to be really mentally prepared to start your own business.”