1y
Thank you for sharing your honest feedback.
First, I want to acknowledge the obstacles you are facing when sharing your concerns—thank you for shedding light on this. To streamline communication, I welcome the opportunity to connect 1:1 to fully hear your thoughts.
Regarding the regular layoffs, I understand how disruptive and discouraging this can be for team members. I agree that we face plenty of challenges, and it is always a steep mountain to climb each year to “earn the right” to keep moving forward as an independent company.
I also acknowledge that in 2022 and 2023, our business slowed sufficiently quickly and differently than we had forecasted that we needed to do a mid-year cost reduction, outside of our annual planning process, in order to remain on track as it related to our profitability targets. This meant that for those two years, we had two cost reduction events per year. Thankfully, in 2024, we did not require an off-cycle cost reduction, and we don’t anticipate this in 2025. But it is our expectation that likely every year, as part of the annual planning cycle, in addition to making incremental investments in growth areas, we will consistently need to identify areas where we need to reduce expenses, which will most often include reducing team member positions that are no longer financially sustainable. This is an uncomfortable, difficult reality, but one that nearly every large, financially sustainable company faces and works through as part of its annual planning process. With this, we will always strive to be in a position to provide generous severance and to try to help our affected team members land on their feet.
In response to your feedback that you feel the company is directionless, I appreciate you voicing this concern; thank you for raising the concern and helping us stay vigilant about where we might be falling short. We deeply value team member feedback, as team member engagement is at the heart of our company strategy and the core of our company flywheel. When our team members feel supported and engaged, it drives everything we do, and as a leadership team, we need to be clear-eyed in how our key stakeholders perceive us—our team members being one of the most important.
As part of every annual planning cycle we perform a strategy review, of our company strategy, including our stakeholder strategy for team members, clients and shareholders, and as part of 2025 planning, we focused on our product strategy. During every All Team Member meeting in 2025 we will be sharing strategy updates – regarding our company strategy and our product strategy as well.
I want to acknowledge that there will be instances where we placed the wrong bets and pursued the wrong tradeoffs. Our best approach, I believe, is to be humble, be continuous learners, and adapt as we go. Feedback such as this, when specific and principled, can help us stay nimble. We want the best ideas to rise to the top, always!
With that acknowledgment, I am confident we have the right plan, the right team, and a solid foundation as a profitable company to continue to execute our mission to support our clients as the catalyst for massive, measurable, data-informed healthcare improvement.
I hope you’ll find a bright future ahead of you at Health Catalyst, including finding our strategy discussions at each monthly all team member meeting in 2025 to be helpful and informative.
Best, Dan Burton
