Tony Braswell got the idea for his company after his son ran out of ketchup and ordered a replacement through Amazon.
"I called him saying, 'Are you out of your mind?' and he said, 'Hey it's free delivery, I'll get it tomorrow," Braswell said,
Braswell was working at his staffing company at the time, dealing with long calls convincing people to go to work. He decided to take the quick turnaround time for the bottle of ketchup and instill that model at his company, Gale Healthcare.
The company is the "Uber" for staffing nurses, meaning facilities — predominantly long-term care units — can use the software to order a nurse if they're short staffed, a major issue in that industry.
"There is a nurses shortage everywhere — Covid didn't change it, and people are literally dying on the table," he said. "We have to fix it."
The company, named after famed nurse Florence Nightingale, was founded in 2016 and has more than 25,000 nurses in its system, adding roughly 275 a week. Nurses can apply through the Gale Healthcare program. They are then vetted with a background check, same-day drug test and more. Nurses are paid the same day for any shifts they take through Gale Healthcare, which Braswell believes is helpful when it comes to addressing nurse burnout.
"Gale Healthcare is a marketplace; I can't create new nurses, but I can create efficiencies with the ones we have," he said. "And the same-day pay, that's the key. Because if you have a car payment tonight and rent is due Friday, you getting paid in two weeks doesn't help."
His goal is to keep up a hiring boom to sift through the thousands of applications the company receives from nurses, with the hope they can hire 500 nurses a week by the end of the year. The company had $100 million in annualized revenue at the end of 2020, with $200 million projected annualized revenue for the end of this year. He hopes to hit $500 million in revenue in the next three years, then plans to file an initial public offering.
"Our model shows now we will do it in 2023," he said. "Can we do it sooner? Yeah, I just have to hire more nurses."
He also has the arguably loftier ambition of building his own nursing schools, if the current trend of small nursing class sizes continues.
"We have the students, we have the demand but it's so tough to get in," he said. "And that's wrong, so it will take money to tackle that, which is why I'm trying to get Gale to a certain size. I solve problems and if there is a problem there is a solution. With this, the solution is we have to create more classrooms."
The company is in the process of raising a $50 million Series A after being bootstrapped. It has been overwhelmed with interest from private equity firms, so Braswell said they want to bring in a chief financial officer.
"We have to increase our bandwidth to hire more nurses, and I have to hire more recruiters to process these people," he said.
Braswell acknowledges Gale has been largely under the radar, despite spanning 35 states.
"Last year we got nominated for Small Business of the Year by the [Tampa Bay] Chamber of Commerce and it's like, 'Oh, someone cares about us?'" Braswell said with a chuckle. "We just come to work every day. It's a 24-hour business; we don't have time to look up."
