We were lucky to catch up with JENNIFER HORSPOOL recently and have shared our conversation below.

JENNIFER, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s jump to the end – what do you want to be remembered for?

I would love to be an integral part of fixing health and healthcare, in this country, and worldwide.

A friend of mine posted a question on Facebook the other day, “What would you do if you suddenly inherited $200M. I said, “Fix healthcare.” Community-based healthcare is the most economical way to receive healthcare services today. But it’s difficult for physicians to own and run their medical practices, keep up on the latest technologies, maintain compliance with our ever-demanding laws, see patients, and maintain top-quality care. Private equity is acquiring physician-owned practices in nearly every specialty and aggregating them into MSOs – management services organizations where the business professionals run the back-office business side, freeing up clinicians to focus on the clinical side.

Private equity is in the business of making money. Buy, build, sell every 3-5, maybe 7 years. But they also have an opportunity right now to build better than we ever have before. This would require new ways of thinking. New ways of asking questions that will disrupt the current medical care and pave the way for better wellness care that prevents or delays the need for advanced medical care.

More than half of hospitals in the U.S. are operating in the red. I’ve seen figures as high as 60% or more operating in the red. Payers are delaying payments, denying claims, and stressing the system further. The Affordable Care Act has turned healthcare insurance back into long-term care insurance as patients have deductibles reaching $10,000 per year per patient before their benefits kick in. Cash-only healthcare systems are running blood panels that show patients more intricate details about food sensitivities and toxins in their body that traditional healthcare systems are not currently doing. Alternative therapies are showing tremendous favor in keeping patients healthy and making traditional western treatments either more effective when used in combination or unnecessary in certain cases.

Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) has already proven it can pass the medical exam. Soon, we should be able to input data from alternative therapies, which traditionally haven’t had the funds to run expensive clinical trials to achieve FDA approval, and we will be able to track the efficacy of alternative therapies to see which types of people they help, which they don’t and why, much faster. In theory, with AI, all data points in MedTech, biotech, pharmaceuticals, and alternative treatments will be able to gather and analyze data faster. Combine that with the collective intelligence of human capital at each of these MSOs and we should be able to design the healthcare of the future as more wellness care and even better sick care.

AI is already being used in orthopedics to scan a body and tell the person where their joints are misaligned, which ligaments and muscles need to be strengthened, and it can spit out home exercise and dietary programs to enhance a person’s health, which could, in essence, reduce illness and injury. Long-term effects would be less injured people, less need for orthopedics, less surgery, less need for ORs, less need for physical therapy, chiropractic, etc.

So overall, the long-lasting effect would be more focus on health and prevention so that less “hospital” care is necessary. Less need for surgery and medications because we’re a healthier society overall. It would incorporate mental health and wellness into every aspect, along with many other integrative ideas. It’s really a combining of the woo woo and alternative therapy methods with traditional western methods and behavioral health for an overall healthier society.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I got into the field of public relations because I like to tell stories that influence people to take action or to think differently. As a child, I got to see how much we love to love the brands we identify with. Branding wasn’t really a term we used in business until the mid to late 90s. Prior to that, we thought a logo was a brand – rather than a representation of that brand. Prior to the 1970s, we wore clothes. Rich people had brand names, the rest of us shopped at Sears, Kmart, and Mervyns. As sports figures moved into celebrity status, brands started asking athletes to wear their logo. As fans wanted to identify with their athletes, they started “wearing the tag on the outside,” as we would say. NIKE and ADIDAS were suddenly splattered across our t-shirts. By the late 70s, brands were amuck and middleclass everywhere wanted to display their brands to depict their style. I always found this fascinating, and I loved to contribute to the love of a brand.

I started working when I was 7 years old. First selling newspaper subscriptions door to door to earn my way to Magic Mountain or Knott’s Berry Farm, local amusements near my home in Southern California. Then I got my own newspaper route when I was 9, and I started to understand the ins and outs of entrepreneurialism. I understood that I wanted more people to read my newspaper than the other city newspaper, ‘cuz that made my route bigger, and I earned more money. In college and my first two jobs after college, I had the opportunity to learn about brands from a variety of perspectives.

I did my senior thesis in school on the LA Rams, then watched to my amazement how I didn’t stay with them when I felt that they left me for St. Louis. They abandoned me and they were already challenging to love, so I felt it was fine to leave them.

A friend of mine worked at El Pollo Loco at the time. I liked their food but thought their salsa was atrocious as it tasted like smashed up tomatoes without any seasoning. She took it personally – even though she didn’t own the store, nor did any of her family or friends. She worked there, so she felt the need to defend it. I found her loyalty to the brand interesting.

My internship and first job out of college was with a government-funded nonprofit that connected people with developmental disabilities with jobs in the community. On the surface, I learned how to implement an entire PR program from purpose to objectives to strategy and tactics. On an internal level, I learned to see people as souls inside of a body over which they may or may not have control.

The second job I had was at the American Cancer Society, a 501c3 charity where I spent a good portion of my early career. I also spent a few years in sales at Xerox, Pepsi and a job recruiting agency in between roles at ACS. I remember volunteers, many of whom were cancer survivors, offering me tons of insights and advice, “Getting old ain’t for sissies, Jennifer.” “It’s not about the stuff, it’s about the relationships and the positive impact you have on the lives of others.” And so much more. It was during these years that I discovered a poem, which I no longer recall word for word but the gist of it is this, “I want to live my life so that I’m proud of the person staring back at me when I look in the mirror.” I did my absolute best to be this person. To live that life. And although I’ve failed many times, this is still at the core of who I am and my mission in life.

I often viewed myself as an angel in people’s lives – like I went through hell so that I could bring them peace, joy and understanding. I was in and out of marriage in a hot minute in my 20s and figured I got divorced so that I could keep everyone else together. I’m credited with saving many marriages, some that are seemingly lasting a lifetime, and others that made it work until they finally just couldn’t.

I’ve long had a dream of launching a healing-style business that takes away people’s pain and replaces it with peace, love, and joy. I just never knew how to make money doing it. So after becoming a certified life and business coach in 2005 and a neuromuscular therapist in 2007, I took a vacation to Bali and came back to a world that started to crumble. By early 2008, no way was I going to open up a business I didn’t even understand myself. So I asked myself what I would miss in PR if I didn’t accomplish it before starting this business. I answered: I’d really like to work in a PR agency, and I’d really like to work in a big corporation where I was part of the management team building the brand – and oh… and how great would it be if it was in oncology, since I’d just spent more than 13 years in the industry.

I put it out to the universe and the next week I was recruited to two jobs at once: Hill and Knowlton and US Oncology. I wanted the US Oncology job 100%! My insecurities told me I would be stronger, smarter, better if I took the agency job first. So I did. It was a mismatch to say the least. I went from a role where I was operating 17 vastly different and exciting committees locally, across the state, and nationwide, to doing a mono-style role of trying get media attention around investigators bringing drugs to life. Not that bringing pharmaceuticals to market is any small feat – it just wasn’t a fit for me and I wasn’t a fit for it. Luckily, my recruiter for US Oncology called to tell me they still hadn’t hired the role I interviewed for and would I like it. “YES!!!”

I started with US Oncology in October of 2008. They had both an unknown brand outside of community oncology and a negative brand inside of it. I got to work. We reconfigured their messaging – they were using internal messaging for their external communications, and it bit them hard in a headline no one wants. Once we got their messaging right, and focused on growing the most interesting aspects of their business, I was able to take them from zero media inclusion to 350 stories in the first year, followed by 500 and 600 stories every year since. We caught the attention of suitors, and we were purchased by McKesson for $2.2B in just 2.25 years.

Following the merger, as happens, two or more people are in roles that only need one team member. As my colleagues started leaving and launching businesses of their own, my phone started ringing, “Jennifer, can you do for us over here what you did for us over there?” I had a readymade business.

I launched first as Jennifer Horspool Public Relations then later rebranded as Engagement PR & Marketing with the help of my business coach at the time, Jeff Klubeck. We make brands seen, known, and revered for their expertise. We guide brands to fully understand their value, their differentiators, and how they can do business better; then we give them platforms to share their expertise to help others, to educate others, and to do good in the world, and spread the magnetic messages of their company and services and how they help people.

As AI seemingly encroaches on the communications industry, I caution a few things: AI can string together words and give you marketing and communications campaigns in an instant, but it can’t make the intelligent decisions on whether these campaigns are a good idea. Human capital will continue to be necessary for the vital decisions that need to happen, especially during critical times. Still, human capital can fail too, as we’ve seen recently with Bud Light, Miller Light, Nike, and long ago with Blockbuster.

AI can be used for good or for evil. It can help us prevent the need for more healthcare by improving our wellness long before healthcare is needed. It can become a powerful tool – how we use it is up to us.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I do a lot of speaking and writing articles, like this one, and I genuinely care about people and outcomes. I network a lot and I truly enjoy meeting and knowing people and finding ways to bring value to them and our relationship.

I think my reputation is built from the energy I exude and my actions and words. I’m real. I’m raw. I’m open to seeing myself as human and I strive to see the humanness in others. I don’t lie to people and tell them PR is easy and I’ll get you on the front page of the NY Times. You have to earn your way there – by being interesting and timely and important in some way to the readers of the front page and the editors and writers who put it together. Life is interesting. If I can ask you the right questions to get you to see a new perspective on life, and that perspective helps you, then I’m building the reputation I’d like; how I’d like to be thought of when you think of me.

I believe, at our core, we all want to know that we added value. To be loved, adored, appreciated, respected, honored, noticed; we want to belong. The most animalistic instincts are to kill the weak ones because they make us vulnerable. It’s not necessarily a conscious thought, it’s an animalistic thought to survive in the wild. The more we grow as humans out of our reptilian brain into a higher consciousness, we realize it’s care for the weak that makes us as a society, stronger. That’s when I realized it’s all an energy. I want my reputation and my lifelong legacy to coincide. At the heart of it, it’s helping people do better and be better in this world. When we’re healthy, we’re nicer, because we feel good. That’s my ultimate goal: to help people feel good about themselves and their position in life.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

Napoleon Hill, Outwitting the Devil; Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love; Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth; Joseph D. Murphy, The Power of the Subconscious Mind; John Medina, Brain Rules; Deepak Chopra, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success; Brian Smith, The Birth of a Brand; Tony Dale, the Cure for Healthcare; Gregg Braden, The Science of Self-Empowerment; Liza Boubari, a clinical hypnotherapist and founder of HealWithin; Erwin Wils, an engineer-trained hypnotherapist; Jim Bagian an MD, engineer and NASA scientist; Veronica Parks, a soul healer; and dozens of oncology, pharmaceutical, MedTech, and other scientists and innovators, plus many, many more.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://engagementpr.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/engagementprmktg/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EngagementPR
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/engagementpr
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/EngagementPr

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