Scaling Your Healthcare Company: Is It Time for an Outside Advisor?

The Leadership Investment I Resisted - And Why It Changed My Trajectory

By: Jeremy VanDevender

Roughly a decade ago, the investors in the company I was leading made a decision I initially resisted. They brought in an outside advisor to work alongside me.

When you are deeply invested in building something, outside involvement can feel personal. I questioned whether it reflected doubt about my leadership or my ability to scale the organization.

What I eventually understood was that it was neither. It was a commitment to raising the ceiling.

That advisor did not take over strategy or operations. She expanded my capacity to lead. She brought perspective earned from scaling other organizations through complexity. She identified structural gaps and process risks that were invisible to me at the time.  She forced me to lead with strategy, not instinct and ultimately, she forced discipline around prioritization, process, execution and decisive leadership that I was lacking at the time.

The result was measurable; we won at every turn. My leadership depth increased. Growth became intentional rather than reactive. I evolved into a more capable executive because I was challenged to operate at a higher standard.  It changed my career, it changed my view of leadership, and it put us as a company on a trajectory that few would have imagined.

There is a meaningful difference between operating a successful company and architecting one to perform at scale. Early growth rewards speed and instinct. Scaling rewards structure, clarity, and disciplined talent development.

Marcus Buckingham has said:

“People grow most where they have the most potential, not where they have the most weakness.”

Scaling organizations works the same way. You don’t fix growth by over-optimizing minor inefficiencies. You unlock it by aligning strengths, clarifying roles, and intentionally developing high-potential leaders before they are urgently needed.

In recent conversations with founders and operators, I have encountered hesitation around engaging experienced advisory support. Often it comes down to cost, not conceptualizing the ROI of such an engagement or the belief that internal leadership should be able to solve scaling challenges independently.

I understand that instinct. I once shared it.

But experience has taught me that instinct and effort are not substitutes for pattern recognition. Learning exclusively through trial and error becomes exponentially more expensive as complexity increases and that is where the real ROI of engaging an expert shows itself.

Jim Collins shared a thought that I love:

“Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”

Vision is rarely the constraint for ambitious organizations. Leadership depth, structural alignment, and clarity of true north are.

The most consequential work in scaling is architectural. It involves aligning reporting structures with strategy, identifying high-potential leaders multiple layers down, building succession pathways early, and making difficult talent decisions before they become destabilizing.

That work benefits from experience.

At Equus, we bring operating experience from scaling healthcare and distributed services platforms across multiple markets and ownership environments. We focus on trajectory — ensuring that strategy, structure, and leadership capacity are aligned with ambition.

Engaging experienced guidance is not an admission of weakness. It is a deliberate decision to accelerate development, compress time, and build something exceptional with intention.

The strongest leaders I have worked with are not those determined to prove they can do it alone. They are those committed to raising the standard of what their organization can become.

If you’re serious about scaling with intention, not experimentation, and want experienced operators and leaders in the room, that’s the work we do at Equus.

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