Laid Off at 48. Zero Clients. On Track for $19.4M in 3 Years
Steve Anderson was a milkman in South Carolina before he picked up a phone in healthcare recruiting. Twenty-five years later, he got laid off at 48 — part of a 1,500-person RIF — with five daughters, a mortgage, and no plan B.
Three months in, they pitched their first investor. He told them they were idiots and hung up. That call is the reason Optigy exists in its current form
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Steve Anderson was a milkman in South Carolina before he picked up a phone in healthcare recruiting. Twenty-five years later, he got laid off at 48 — part of a 1,500-person RIF — with five daughters, a mortgage, and no plan B.
Three months in, they pitched their first investor. He told them they were idiots and hung up. That call is the reason Optigy exists in its current form.
Steve and his co-founders rebuilt the company in 48 hours. No clients, only partners. No vendor relationships, no race to the bottom, no "send us reqs and we'll send you names." It cost them roughly $3.5M in walked-away deals in year one. It also got them in a room with one of the largest healthcare organizations in the country, where they built the first physician healthcare recruitment team in the ACO space — on a $400 website, an ATS they didn't own, and a phone they hadn't bought yet.
Year one: $1.1M off six months of real building. Year two: $3.7M. Year three, closing January 2027, on track for $19.4M. 53 partners, 84% close rate, only two partners lost in two years. A private equity deal closed December 2025 that changed what's possible from here.
This episode is the operator's playbook behind that arc. Why "partners, not clients" isn't marketing — it's a P&L decision. What broke in Q1 of year two when the credit card bills came due. What Steve learned in-house at a company that saved his life five months after a heart attack he didn't see coming. And the line his older brother gave him that reshaped how he thinks about time: "I have lived longer than I have left to live."
If you've been waiting for the right moment to bet on yourself, this is the one to listen to twice.
What You'll Learn:
- Why "partners, not clients" is the model that scaled Optigy from zero to a $19.4M run-rate
- The exact moment Year 1 broke — and the leadership shift that fixed it
- How to walk into a 2,200-location healthcare org with no website and no ATS
- What in-house recruiting teaches you that no agency seat ever can
- The five-part call structure and where 90% of recruiters fall apart on the transition
- Why "work works" is the only input that matters early — and what replaces it as you scale
- The diligence questions that protect founders from the wrong PE partner
📌 Connect with Steve Anderson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sgandersonlmg/
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Fo9ioNrWsM0
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