Shaun Sorensen

       I interviewed the CEO of American Healthcare Lending Shaun Sorensen. I met Shaun at one of the career fair things on campus. He seemed like his company had a pretty interesting story so I invited him to go out to lunch. It was a great interview, and I was able to learn a lot from what he said. American Healthcare Lending started with Shaun and his brother Nick. Nick at worked in various companies as a marketing VP an Shaun had much experience in sales. Together they came up with a financing platform that could be disruptive to the traditional medical lending.
        Before they even had a viable product, Shaun went and sold the service to a few dental offices to see if it would work. He had to cancel on them as many of them were willing to sign up. From here they bootstrapped and worked from their garage for 1 year. They hired the right IT people to help them build their platform. Shaun talked about the hard times, and times when they both wanted to just drop it and move on. They both stuck though the hard times and long hours to make it work. They are still fairly small with 30 employee's, but they are growing at a very fast rate, and they are making a good profit. They plan on expanding and hiring 30 more in the next year. They have funded over 500,000 million dollars since 2009 when they started.
        I learned from him what to expect when starting a business. He didn't sugar coat the experience but gave me a good feel on what he and his brother felt. He explained of the stress and even difficulties of hiring for the first time and making decisions to help scale up. He said it's not as easy when your the one making all the big choices. He was humble and very grateful that the hard times were over.