Destined for a healthy partnership (Pete, Lavender)
Derenda “Dee” (Sublett) Pete ’79 and Carol (Jordan) Lavender ’79 met as nursing students in one of the first classes at Lamar University to earn bachelor of science in nursing degrees. When they graduated, their relationship consisted of nothing more than friendly hellos.
Fast-forward to 2007, and the two are friends and business partners in a Houston-based health care consulting firm celebrating more than a decade in business with a national client list.
“Trying to get our name out there is our challenge,” Pete said. “We’re competing with a lot of larger health care consulting groups.”
Pete and Lavender created Insight Advantage with nothing more than their brainpower and two laptops 11 years ago. After some lean times early on, they established a profitable business with a growing list of satisfied clients. Insight Advantage works with hospitals, large physicians’ practices and clinics to improve customer service, productivity and profitability. Lavender and Pete draw on their clinical and managerial experience to study clients’ health care organizations and make objective recommendations about how the companies can refine what they do.
A big emphasis for clients now is patient flow, said Pete, who has authored books and spoken nationally on emergency department operations. The company looks at how a hospital moves patients from the doors of the emergency room through admission, treatment and discharge. Identifying bottlenecks and trying to clear them might mean recommending changes in scheduling or staffing. The ultimate goal is greater efficiency, higher profitability and better patient care. “The patient is the nucleus of what happens,” Pete said.
The company also offers on-site management training for frontline health care managers such as nurses. Lavender authored those educational materials and was involved in developing labor productivity software the company uses.
Finding out what clients need means frequent travel to facilities across the U.S. Pete spends about three weeks a month on the road. Frequent travel also has been part of Lavender’s routine for years. The pair seeks to develop more business in Texas. “We would like to have a greater presence in our backyard,” Lavender said.
Lavender has a daughter and two granddaughters. Pete has a son and two grandsons. Both raised their children as divorced single mothers while working full time and furthering their education. Today, they are part of the sandwich generation, each caring for parents while enjoying their grandchildren and watching their children achieve their goals—all as they direct the day-to-day operations of a successful firm. The consulting business is a far cry from where they started.
Pete knew when she graduated from Beaumont’s Hebert High School in 1975 she wanted a health care career. She researched several options, choosing Lamar because of its location close to home and the onset of the four-year degree program. “The program had some really good teachers,” she said.
Her training at Lamar prepared her for a nursing job at Baptist Hospital in Beaumont, which led to supervisory positions at the hospital. “The nursing school was the core,” Pete said. “We found the curriculum to be very challenging.”
For Lavender, a Nederland High School graduate, becoming a nurse was not part of a long-term plan. Encouraged by her mother, who was an instructor in the one-year LVN program at Lamar, she went through a respiratory therapy certification program at Lamar University. She chose the program because of an aversion to needles, but found she still had to learn to draw blood.
“Every step of the way (the program) was challenging me to do things out of my comfort zone,” Lavender said.
After completing her certification, Lavender went to work for Baptist Hospital as a respiratory therapist and returned to Lamar to study nursing. Both programs, and the professors she encountered as a student, had a profound impact on the young woman who had never given much thought to academia. “It really boosted my self-confidence. From then on, I said, ‘If I can do this, I can go on.’ I really wanted a degree,” Lavender said. “The nursing program was strenuous. It prepared us clinically, but also focused on management, which is critical to our success today.”
The fact that Pete also worked while in nursing school, something discouraged by faculty, gave the pair more in common. The bond was not established, though, until a few years later when both were nurses at Baptist Hospital on the leading edge of emergency care. Pete was director of nursing for the hospital’s new Life Flight program when Lavender, director of the interventional cardiac cath lab, joined her on a flight to transport a cardiac transplant patient to Houston.
A friendship was born. It took a hiatus when the women lost touch temporarily after Lavender moved on to a Houston-area hospital.
“For whatever reason, our paths seemed to follow along the same lines,” Pete said. Pete initially left Baptist Hospital for Galveston, where she worked on a master’s degree in nursing and worked as a nurse manager at a hospital. She later applied for a job at the Houston hospital where, unbeknownst to her, Lavender was the director of cardiac services. When the chief nursing officer noticed the Lamar University connection, she brought Pete’s resume to Lavender to see if she knew the applicant.
Pete was hired as director of the emergency department, and the friendship continued and grew. Both women had abilities in management and completed master of business administration degrees together at Houston Baptist University.
Through hospital mergers and acquisitions, first Lavender and then Pete, found themselves in search of a new path. Together, they began working as consultants for an independent consulting firm. The work focused on training clinicians and frontline managers in management skills. When the consulting firm later sold, the women decided to strike out on their own. “We just kind of stepped into it with both feet, eyes shut,” Pete said.
Though Lavender said they decided “somewhat naively” to start their own consulting business with no capital on hand, they certainly bring their business acumen to bear in the work they do. Lavender said she and Pete are clinicians first and have an advantage in understanding both the clinical and business side of health care.
“That passion for nursing, for the patients, really came to the forefront of everything we did,” Lavender said. “We understand financial issues, the business issues, but we also understand that the whole reason hospitals and health care facilities are in operation is patient care.”
So far, all of Insight Advantage’s business has come from referrals, not from soliciting new clients. With a new focus on developing business in Texas, that soon could change.
From a helicopter flight as nurses focused jointly on one patient’s care to a joint business that took flight more than a decade ago, Lavender and Pete have been going places for years and see new opportunities on the horizon.
