Control is Within Reach – Will Gadsden, Co-Founder and CEO – Ctrl M Health
Ctrl M Health is a digital health company providing integrated health and wellness solutions for those living with headache and migraine. We’re proud to have Will Gadsden, Co-Founder and CEO, join us today. We discuss Will’s career, how the idea of Ctrl M Health came about, the new company, how they navigated launching during COVID-19, and future plans. If you like our podcast, please subscribe!
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Transcription:
Bill Gullan:
Greetings one and all. This is Real-World Branding. I’m Bill Gullan, president of Finch Brands, the premier boutique brand consultancy. We’re happy that you’re with us. Hope everybody is hanging in there. School has started and, oh my goodness, at least in my house we’re holding on for dear life and hoping for everything to work out and get better soon across our lives.
Bill:
Speaking of improvement and making life better, we have Will Gadsden today. Will’s the co-founder and CEO of a super cool startup but sort of mature and thoughtful digital health company called Ctrl M. Will will relate to you his career, pretty conventional and successful finance background but a pivot in mid-career in the direction of entrepreneurship and greater purpose and meaning, which led him to the Jefferson Headache Center, which led him to really begin to understand and study what is a mysterious and underserved market, massive market of people who live with and struggle with migraine and chronic headaches and Ctrl M exists to make those folks lives better and we’ll talk you through all of it. Enjoy Will Gadsden.
Bill:
Thrilled to be joined by Will Gadsden, the co-founder and CEO of Ctrl M this morning. Will, thanks for being with us.
Will Gadsden:
Bill, thank you very much for inviting me to be on.
Bill:
Absolutely. I cannot wait to hear you tell this story. I know that those in our audience, given some of the dynamics that shaped the migraine community and really some of the underlying bases for this business that you’re building here will be amazed to hear what you’ve been working on.
Bill:
Why don’t we start where we normally do, which is a little bit about your own journey and what led you to this endeavor at Ctrl M that you’re part of now.
Will:
Sure. By way of introduction to Ctrl M, Ctrl M is an innovative digital health company focused on helping to support those living with headache and migraine. I start with that introduction because my wife always likes to remind me that I founded a digital health company but I have neither a technology background nor a healthcare background.
Will:
My background, and the answer to your question, is that I come from the finance and banking and asset management industry for about 20 years. Had an opportunity to make a career shift, thought about some of the things that I really liked about my experience in finance and asset management, entrepreneurship, building up the businesses and really developing customer relationships and then I thought about some of the things that I was really excited about adding to the next 20 years of my career and that was a sense of purpose, a sense of helping others, a sense of building something that was truly valued by the customers it served.
Will:
Those two combined concepts of entrepreneurship and purpose led me to Ctrl M and to a digital health company, which I think is truly poised to revolutionize how headache and migraine health and wellness is delivered.
Bill:
Yeah. Definitely. Notable for our listeners, and this took me a while to learn too, is that migraine is migraine. It’s not migraines. Migraines are episodes. We’re not talking about episodes. Migraine is a condition. This is an ongoing syndrome or disease, whatever the word is, with which many millions of people struggle.
Bill:
Will, what was it about … We know there was a connection to Jefferson, which you can tell us about, but so often as we’ve met people along the way here, everyone has a personal story about being touched, someone in their family, someone close to them who’s challenged by migraine. What was the origin story that really lit you up and led you to form the team that is building this company?
Will:
Good question. I am actually one of the few people who does not have a personal connection to migraine. I’m very fortunate that neither myself nor anyone in my immediate family suffers from the chronic disease and it is a disease for clarity.
Will:
My introduction to migraine really started with during the search for that sense of purpose, that opportunity to combine entrepreneurship and a sense of purpose, I was introduced to an investor who had just before our meeting been approached by the Jefferson Headache Center in Philadelphia and senior leadership at Jefferson Health, which is the overarching health system under which the Jefferson Headache Center lives, he’d been approached with a question, which is: is there an opportunity that he could see as an investor to create some form of public/private partnership between the Jefferson Headache Center and private entrepreneurship, private capital, and professional business management.
Will:
I think the idea stemmed around Jefferson’s recognition that the Jefferson Headache Center is a crown jewel within their broader medical community, that it is one of the leading comprehensive headache centers in the United States, if not the leading headache center and over 25 plus years has led some of the most innovative medical and clinical research into the field of migraine.
Will:
When the investor I met with brought this to my attention he simply said, “Hey, is this something you’d like to explore for me?” To be honest, Bill, I said yes but I knew nothing about migraine. In all candor, I sort of left that meeting saying, “Well, it’s interesting but I don’t foresee a lot of opportunity” just because I didn’t understand it.
Will:
About a week later, I started to dig in and say, “I might as well try to explore migraine a little bit” and so my personal experience or my personal journey started with researching migraine and, frankly, putting myself in a position of somebody who was experiencing severe headache and saying, “Okay, what do I do next? How do I learn about this?”
Will:
What I was amazed to find out was a few things about migraine, which really blew me away. One, the scope of the challenge. 10 to 12% of the global population is estimated to live with migraine. That’s over a billion people in the world. It is 40 million people in the United States alone. The scope of the disruption that migraine causes within this community can really extend from one or two migraines a year, which in themselves can be debilitating, to people living with chronic migraine, which is defined as 15 or more migraine days a month.
Bill:
Wow.
Will:
Which is just really outstanding. The other thing we discovered in our research was trying to look at how people living with migraine can find solutions. I was, frankly, shocked to find that for the 40 million people living with migraine, there are only about 550 to 600 headache specialists in the United States.
Bill:
Amazing.
Will:
They tend to be neurologists. They are specially trained for headache and the nuances of migraine, it’s a very specialized field but if you think about those two numbers, 40 million and 550 to 600 specialists there’s just a huge mismatch. Most people living with this chronic disease are not receiving the care that they should, they don’t have access to the expertise that they require, and that started my journey because I was just flabbergasted by that.
Will:
In a time when heart disease and diabetes, which are both super important disease states, which are being addressed by the medical community, they receive a lot of funding and a lot of attention. I was just flabbergasted that migraine really has lived within the shadows for everyone except for those suffering with the disease.
Bill:
Yeah. Is it fair also to say that there is a lot of social misunderstanding and maybe even a little bit of stigma related to how those who don’t suffer from migraine view those who do? “It’s a bad headache, fight through it. What is it? It’s stress-related.” All these sort of … We’ve gone through, hopefully, an awakening when it comes to mental health, for example, when it comes to diabetes, when it comes to other conditions but migraine hasn’t quite reached that it seems.
Will:
I think that that’s right. You used an important word in your statement, which was stigma. There’s been a lot of research and there’s a lot of ongoing research into this concept of stigma as it relates to migraine.
Will:
A lot of people view migraine as “just a headache” and it is anything but. Migraine is not just the pain, the head pain and discomfort associated with the disease. It can be visual aura. It can be extreme sensitivity to light and sound. It can lead to isolation and sense of removal from society as people need to seek a quiet bedroom or a quiet office to help get through a migraine attack.
Will:
It can cause a myriad array of various social and emotional challenges. It really impacts all of life and for those who are living with the disease. That problem alone, again, your question was what was my personal journey? I was just floored by the extent of the challenge that people living with migraine face, the challenge they face in seeking resources and information to help them in this journey and I was struck by what a unique opportunity it could be to further explore what Jefferson proposed, which was a public/private partnership with the leading comprehensive headache center in the United States. It just dawned on me that this was worth taking the time to really explore how could you use the expertise, the intellectual property of the Jefferson Headache Center, how could you deliver that in a new and innovative way to this community to really support them and to help improve their quality of life?
Bill:
Yeah. Absolutely. Is it fair to say that the clinical side of treating this is both, A, it’s still a little bit mysterious and, B, often involves a variety of different things. We might call it holistic. Having the best or among the best headache centers right under our nose here at Jefferson was obviously a tremendous blessing in a case like this but how is migraine best treated? I’m sure it varies person to person but how advanced would you say the science or the protocol is as it relates to how to help people through this?
Will:
Yeah. Good question. I’ll reiterate that I am not a doctor nor a headache specialist. I’m not providing medical advice and Ctrl M is really focused more on health and wellness as a complement to traditional medicine.
Will:
The question that you asked is one I actually put forth to a specialist at the Jefferson Headache Center and, specifically, the director of the center, Dr. Stephen Silberstein and the director of inpatient admissions, Dr. William Young, in one of our earliest meetings. I asked them how do they define comprehensive headache care?
Will:
They really broke comprehensive headache care down into three pillars. The first pillar is traditional medicine. This is evaluation and consultation with patients. It often leads to the prescription of pharmaceuticals for the management of migraine under a doctor’s supervision. It can also lead to inpatient infusion or outpatient infusion.
Will:
The second pillar that they highlighted and one which they feel like they helped to innovate and really bring into the field is that of psychology. We talked a little bit earlier about the challenges that migraine can present to those living with the disease and whether it’s dealing with the stress and anxiety, which can be triggers for migraine, to the depression and emotional challenges that can result from having migraine. A comprehensive treatment of the disease, they felt and I think very, very intelligently, involved the addition of psychological evaluation and consultation to traditional medicine.
Will:
The third pillar that they highlighted, they got very excited about because there’s a wealth of medical research supporting it and it is an area of a lot of focus these days, and that is behavioral change and lifestyle modification. What does that mean? This means what can … These are activities that those living with the disease can do on their own to help manage their disease and to improve their quality of life. Behavior change and lifestyle modification can range from sleep to hydration and nutrition to exercise and aerobic activity, meditation and mindfulness practices, engaging in social activity and making social connections as a way of supporting yourself as you navigate your journey with the disease.
Will:
We thought this was a really interesting area and we asked them what they do to help support patients within this pillar, the idea of behavioral change and lifestyle modification, and they were quite clear that they very actively recommend this to their patients, they direct their patients to explore yoga, explore meditation, think about sleep, all of these things but that they don’t have a centralized resource, a centralized place to point their patients to for accurate and balanced information and for coordinated, integrative programs to help people navigate the integration of these healthy activities into their lives.
Will:
Bill, frankly, that one conversation sparked the kernels of what became Ctrl M. How can we use technology? How can we use the expertise of the Jefferson Headache Center and how can we develop a product and a suite of services to help people coordinate and integrate this information into a centralized source and empower people with the knowledge, the resources, and the tools to engage proactively in self-care at home, in their office, on the road, at school, as a means of augmenting the traditional physician relationship and supporting themselves in the majority of life that exists between doctors’ appointments?
Bill:
Yeah. Absolutely. You have, Will, your own professional journey, which has reached a moment of pivot. You have an interested investor. You have an interested partner who also happens to be among the most credible in the space. You also have a massive underserved population who really needs support. Stars are aligning here. It’s time to do something. Take us through, it’s been a year or more, that origin story. You decided that this was an opportunity with seizing for a variety of different reasons. Only recently this has launched. It’s been quite a period of time of conceptualizing the offering, building the technology, et cetera. Take us through the launch process.
Will:
Sure. Once we had the rough sketches to a business plan, which is full of lots of assumptions and best guesses, we had to start putting some data and some hard evidence behind this before we could really commit to building the business.
Will:
Actually that’s when I was introduced to you, Bill, and to your team at Finch. The first thing we did in this whole business model was actually work with Finch to conduct a national survey. We reached out to 600 people living with headache and migraine and asked them a series of questions really to start to test our hypotheses. Would access to integrated health and wellness services via mobile technology supported by the credibility of a leading headache center, would that be an attractive solution that people would have an interest in?
Will:
That survey obviously takes a while to develop, it takes a while to execute and then to sort of work through the resulting numbers but the feedback was very positive. You’re familiar with that and that’s what really led a lot of the work that your team did for us very successfully.
Will:
It also started to give us more insight into what was attractive, what was needed by this community, and really what Ctrl M has endeavored to do is fill the gap between the limitations of what the medical community can provide and these are not limitations based on desire, it’s more just limitations based on resources that exist for them to provide to their patients, and what customers need, what their patients are looking for.
Will:
Over the course of a year we started fleshing out the details of the business. We made a few key strategic hires. We hired a woman named Dr. Karen Seebach. She is a pain psychologist, has spent some time working at the Jefferson Headache Center, she helped us start to think through our programming, focused on core health hydration, nutrition, and sleep, movement, self-awareness, self-efficacy, growth, and social connection, integrating evidence-based programming that exists in all of those areas into a coordinated suite of programs for our target audience.
Will:
We engaged other resources to help us think through the UX and UI, these are technical terms for those not familiar with them, how does a person engage with an app or electronic device in sort of exploring and navigating an app or a program? How can we convert Karen’s programming into a digital format in an effective way?
Will:
Then Finch was with us from the beginning to help us think through how do we connect with our target audience? How do we convey the expertise and the credibility of our partner relationship with the Jefferson Headache Center but also reflect empathy and understanding so that we could connect to our target audience and position ourselves as a trusted resource for them.
Will:
That process took well over a year and was a lot of hard work and through it, slowly, a product started to be built and the technologists got heavily involved and we did some user testing and in August of this year we were ready to launch and actually just yesterday we released our press release with Jefferson Health and to the Jefferson Headache Center announcing ourselves formally to the world.
Bill:
Right. Amazing. Ctrl M Health dot com is the, at least, home page on the web but can you talk about the offering, Will? I know there’s an app piece. There’s quizzes. There’s the ability to create basically a plan to get this done and there’s certain products, certainly, that support that plan but what can one expect in working with Ctrl M and seeking some support from Ctrl M?
Will:
Yeah. Thank you for that question. We think of our services across what we call the Ctrl M digital platform, which is really comprised of three digital pieces. The first is our website, which contains the knowledge portal, which is a free publicly-accessible library of articles specifically about migraine, overseen and curated by the headache specialists at the Jefferson Headache Center, and intended to offer an accurate and balanced perspective on a variety of topics related to migraine, both medical, lifestyle, psychological, preventive, reactive, day to day strategies and lifetime perspectives on how to live with migraine, how to understand your disease, and, again, we make that publicly available with the intent of trying to create a lifestyle portal for those looking to explore and understand the disease better.
Will:
The second part of the platform is our mobile app. This is a subscription service. On the mobile app, we deliver access to all of our health and wellness programming. We do so via a very personalized manner. The initial journey through the app takes you through a 30 to 35 question survey where we ask a lot of very specific questions about the user, about their experience, not just with migraine, related to symptoms and how they’re experiencing disease, but also the familiarity with various lifestyle strategies.
Will:
The result of that survey is a personalized wellness plan, which we deliver via the app and email a copy, a written copy of it to them as well. That personalized wellness plan is the starting point for how we recommend they engage in the mobile app’s wealth of health and wellness educational materials, strategies, and very specific activities. The app allows you to schedule these activities to help integrate them in your life. It provides reminders and encouragement to help not just put you on the path towards healthier living but also to help keep you on that path.
Will:
Then, finally, we have analytics and a number of tools where our users can track their activities, track some of their headache symptoms and, hopefully, over time see how improvements can be made by engaging in a multi-modal program.
Will:
The third and final part of our product offering of our digital platform is actually our e-commerce store. On that store, I guess through that store, we offer a proprietary line of dietary supplements that we have developed in collaboration with the Jefferson Headache Center based on a wealth of evidence-based medical research, which supports six different supplements, dietary supplements. These are very common supplements, vitamin B2, magnesium, melatonin, … et cetera, but supports the use of these dietary supplements as appropriate nutritional support for those living with headache and migraine.
Will:
Through the website, through our e-commerce shop, we have a quiz on that site as well, which helps make personalized recommendations for those supplements but our vision in creating a proprietary line of dietary supplements really stemmed from the absence in the supplement market of dietary supplements made specifically for migraine, which are accurate to the medical research and accurate in the form of purity and integrity of the underlying ingredients, ie, the quality of the supplements, but also accurate to the correct dosages, which are in line with what the medical research has shown as well as in line with the absorption characteristics of each of these different dietary supplements. How does your body absorb these to make sure that you are getting the right dosage?
Will:
What we came out with is that the six supplements, which we think are really innovative in delivering the individual dietary supplements to the consumer, our thoughts are that you should only take what you need and what works for you and Ctrl M hopes to be a partner in helping people explore which of these supplements works for them and then provide them the confidence that the supplements they take are of high quality and integrity and healthy for them.
Bill:
Excellent. What a rich and deep and textured way to support people. Along the way, as noted during this year process there were choices that you needed to make regarding tech and regarding the offering and regarding the overall personality. I know we want to maximize your time here but could you reflect a little bit, Will, on you mentioned a little bit earlier about learning about people’s mindset as it relates to living with migraine and there’s a balance, I would imagine here, of caring and warmth along with the clinical credibility that comes with the Jefferson affiliation. Could you speak a little bit about how the personality of the Ctrl M brand and program is intended to feel for those who may be seeking support like this?
Will:
Yeah. Another good question. When we first started thinking about a mobile app as the delivery mechanism, what attracted us to it was the concept that a mobile app is really available to anyone. It democratizes access to this information or this programming across a community, which doesn’t necessarily have access to it if they don’t happen to live in a city with a headache specialist or if they’re not able to get an appointment with a headache specialist.
Will:
Delivering it via a mobile technology was a very attractive medium because we felt it was a very equitable way to deliver our services. The challenge with the medium, though, is that there are just a never-ending sea of new apps and digital health programs that enter the market. What we wanted to do was make sure that we were thoughtful in how we positioned our products, our brand, and our connection to our target audience to make sure that we were able to stand out from the crowd and develop two key concepts in our relationship with our customers. One is trust and the other is credibility.
Will:
The credibility we felt would be based on the foundation of our relationship with the Jefferson Headache Center. We’re not aware of any migraine-specific companies with a relationship as unique and innovative as ours is with the Jefferson Headache Center but the trust is what we really felt like we had to focus on and figure out how to develop.
Will:
In working with Finch and in working with many, many generous people living with migraine who shared their feedback with us, we realized that what we had to demonstrate is that we understood and we appreciated the difficulties that those living with headache and migraine face.
Will:
I have yet to meet a person living with a chronic disease who has not been disappointed by a proposed solution or strategy, something they learned on the internet or something a friend of relative told them works. The biggest challenge is that what works for one may not work for you. It’s a very unique disease and it’s a very personal disease and how you experience it and those things that you can do to help yourself are very unique to you.
Will:
We wanted to try to convey that. We wanted to try to convey that we understood that, we wanted to give an honest approach to it, that as you navigate your journey with migraine, we don’t know the answers to the question of what works for you but we can help provide the information and the confidence in you that the things you’re trying are credible, healthy, and have been shown to potentially work for people living with migraine. If that keeps people on the path towards finding the eventual solutions for them, we thought that was a valued service.
Will:
Building trust but also then building a sense of optimism. Living with migraine is very challenging. There are days where you’re just overwhelmed by the pain and discomfort and then there are days following it where you’re just living a little bit in fear or anxious about the next migraine attack. How in our brand, how in our messaging can we convey that we understand that but that we can also offer hope and hopefully a sense of optimism that there are paths, there are options, and there are steps you can take to improve your quality of life? Whether that’s a reduction in pain, frequency, duration, or intensity of attack or whether it’s by accepting that migraine is a part of your life and finding other ways to improve quality of life through reclaiming components of your life that you thought you have lost. Ctrl M really tries to help tailor the solution that you find to you.
Bill:
Yeah. Terrific. The point you made, Will, there that’s so powerful to me, I mean, beyond the debilitating impact of attacks, it’s just that time in between because once one ends, the clock starts immediately until the next one and you don’t often know when it’s coming. You don’t often know how to manage it or feel any control over it whatsoever and so that notion of anxiety and fear and concern beyond pain to have a holistic system like this is of such tremendous value.
Bill:
What next? I mean, we’re live, the press release went out, the site’s up. I know that you are doing your best to ensure that those who would find value in this are aware of it. Anything we should expect from Ctrl M moving forward? Other things that are high priority for you at the moment?
Will:
Well, the launch has kept us plenty busy as you can imagine. We are fully open for business across all three aspects of our digital platform, the website and knowledge portal, the mobile app, and the e-commerce shop.
Will:
We will really spend the next couple months trying to increase visibility, trying to introduce ourselves to the community living with headache and migraine, but also listening to the feedback that people are willing to provide us. No company starts off with a perfect product and I think that the recognition of that is really important. We’ve spent a lot of time, we’ve tried to be as thoughtful as possible in how we’ve developed our digital platform but now it’s time for us to let people use it and to listen to their feedback and let them tell us what they need, what they like, hopefully, and probably more importantly, what isn’t working for them, what we aren’t providing, what we can improve to improve and enhance their experience on our products.
Will:
We really have our eyes set on trying to listen to our customers, trying to solicit feedback and do our best to try to integrate those ideas into improving our product over the coming months but, hopefully, the years to come.
Bill:
Definitely. Last quick things. I know you’ve got to move. This is launch time. You talked about your own pivot and journey and desire to move in an entrepreneurial direction that had an underlying purpose. Anything you learned either about yourself or about leadership or about business along the way over the course of this last year that really struck you in terms of what it’s taken to build Ctrl M to this point?
Will:
Interesting question. Yes. I have learned a tremendous amount. Building a business from the ground up is not easy. The quality of the people you surround yourself with, a team you build, the partners like Finch and others, who help, who you bring on to help you bring your vision to life, they are all critical and you really need a team to do it.
Will:
I would say that when you have a good vision and when you have a mission, which really is intended to help people, what I’ve learned is that people want to get involved. People find inspiration in that. I find inspiration in it. People can be extremely generous in the advice, the guidance, the assistance they are willing to give when your mission really is to try to help people.
Will:
I’ve been incredibly invigorated by that. I’ve been invigorated by feedback from people living with migraine when we talk about the services we’re building and offering, how emotional they can be in their excitement for these type of services. Migraine can be a confusing and challenging disease for so many reasons but one of the biggest reasons is that people aren’t sure what to do. It can be frustrating when the process of trying various pharmaceuticals or trying various different strategies, non-pharmaceutical strategies, really is a process of elimination. Most things won’t work for them for any individual. It’s finding the ones that do.
Will:
That can be a very frustrating and lonely process and I’ve just been so touched by the excitement people feel when they recognize that there’s a team, a company, a group of people out there trying to bring solutions and partner with them on their journey. If nothing else, it’s been a wonderful, wonderful learning experience for me.
Bill:
I’ll bet.
Will:
I hope that we can deliver for our target audience.
Bill:
No, definitely. Will Gadsden of Ctrl M. That’s a great place to leave it. Congrats on the launch and, obviously, been a lot of work going into it but the work really starts now in terms of helping lives get better and helping people deal with this and we’re really grateful for your time and your friendship.
Will:
Bill, thank you and thank you to the entire Finch team.
Bill:
Of course.
Bill:
Thanks to Will. He has a great team. He’s a great leader. It’s going to be really cool and fun to see what Ctrl M turns into. So much opportunity to make folks lives better and if there’s anything we’ve learned through this process, not surprisingly, I guess anybody who has a friend or family member who lives with migraine is just how debilitating that can be, not only in the throes of an attack but as noted in our interview, in-between, the anxiety, the when is this going to happen? Why can’t I have control? Maybe I shouldn’t do this or that because there might be … That type of stuff just weighs on folks and Ctrl M is there to help untangle it and help make folks better.
Bill:
Another thing we learned, the industry I’m in and branding is so much fun because you learn things. I mean, language matters. We know and we learned through this process as we got deep with the community of folks who both treat and receive treatment for migraine is that it is migraine. Migraine is a disease. Migraines I guess are individual attacks but language matters. If someone deals with migraines that indicates that they’re disconnected episodes.
Bill:
Again, the power of what happens in between those episodes and attacks is often where, A, the challenge and, B, the opportunity may be. Just to even change the language slightly too, instead of talking about migraines, talk about migraine, it makes clear, more clear, and more accurate the task that people face.
Bill:
It’s so fun to learn these kinds of things and language matters. We had some clients in the social services landscape and there’s what’s called people-first language. I could be … Forgive me, those who are experts in this, if I’m mischaracterizing any of it but I was very struck that we don’t talk about disabled people. We talk about people with disabilities. People are not what their conditions are. They’re human. They have dignity. They have opportunity and potential. We all struggle with something. Using precise language to indicate the primacy and agency and fundamental humanity of people, whatever conditions with which they’re struggling is something that we’ve, again, learned along the way and it’s so much fun to catch a glimpse into these individual marketplaces and unique glossary and mode of communication.
Bill:
Anyway, I’m blathering. Stop there. Hope everybody is hanging in there. A little bit of fall in the air. Enjoying that. Football season. School. But we can do it. Signing off from the cradle of liberty.
