Craig Mandeville

Founder and CEO

That’s it. And if everything we do in between that leads to that, then we’re providing true value.

My wife used to work for a home health agency, facilitating patients discharged from the Mayo Clinic who were going into post-acute care. She was faxing things back and forth; there was no data, and transferring the patient from one service to another is already a huge risk in their care. I thought, “I can solve a lot of this.” I made it my mission to automate these processes and provide true interoperability from acute and ambulatory care into post-acute care so that all documentation is available upfront and in real-time. Transparency like that can save lives, and it’s one of our core values at Forcura.

We’re very much a goal-driven organization, and we have those goals on monitors all over our office. We publish our revenue, our client satisfaction—you name it, it’s up there. Everyone knows when things are good and when things are off-track. I have found that to be very rare in most organizations. But when people understand exactly what is off-track, they can rally and make really good, informed decisions to fix things.

We’re also very open with our customers and our partners. We can build new and exciting prototypes and betas for their specific needs, and with their feedback, we reiterate and we go back out. That is how we innovate and build the right products for our customers.

Starting out as an entrepreneur, I wish someone had told me to get a mentor or multiple mentors. This can be the loneliest job, even as CEO. When you seek out others who are local and who have done that, you will be so surprised at how much they want to give back and help. They can validate the direction you’re going, but they can also steer you away from a glacier.

Entrepreneurs think—and I was in this mindset, too—“I’ve got the greatest idea, and I’m not going to tell anyone about it,” because of a fear that someone may steal it. I’ve seen entrepreneurs hunker down in a cave and build a product and not even showcase it until they think it’s perfect. To me, that is the opposite way of how you do this. If you’ve identified a gap and whitespace, build out a simple prototype and go show it to who you think are your customers. Let them tell you what it is and what’s wrong with it, take that feedback, make iterations, and then go back out. I’ve seen a very high degree of success for those who follow that loop, compared to those that go the other track.

I truly believe that Jacksonville is a hidden gem in the southeast corridor of the U.S. For anyone who’s talking about the city, it’s one of my life goals to make sure they can say, “If you’re looking for tech innovation in the southeast, Jacksonville is the place you need to be.”