How Julie Gilbert is building PreciouStatus from the ground up

Pulled over on the side of the road, she started mapping out an idea for an app that would help people receive updates on their loved ones in care.

That moment has grown into PreciouStatus, her young company for which she’s raised more than $1.5 million in investment, boasts world-class advisers including her former boss at Best Buy, former CEO Brad Anderson, and a growing list of clients, including hospitals, daycare centers, pet boarders and military bases.

She’s still using tactics honed in the corporate world — such as including every possible party at the planning table to make sure everybody wins — but now on her own without the corporate power or big budgets.

Her trademark dynamism remains intact, the trait one investor said he found impossible to resist. “I met her, and who can say no once you meet her?” he said to this reporter when listening to her address a University of Minnesota audience last fall.

On the side of that road, Gilbert didn’t like her feeling of despair. She thought about all the people she knew who were worried about family and friends in care centers.

“And I said, you know what, I’m going to change this,” she says—and so an entrepreneur’s mission was born.

Here’s her story, in her words.

“I was doing very well after leaving Best Buy with my consulting firm called WOLF, working with some tremendous clients, and that work continues today with WOLF activities, innovating back into companies and focusing on the female consumer.

I was blessed to have a child with my husband, because I was told I couldn’t have children. I really wanted to be a mom. I’d been there, done that in the executive ranks, and now I know why.

Eight weeks after our son was born my husband had a major stroke, which we initially thought was the flu.

It was quite a journey, because I ended up having to take him to the ER twice, and the first time they told him he had vertigo and sent us home. I just had a feeling that there was something much worse there. He had a major hemorrhage in the fourth ventricle of the brain, which controls all your coordination and motor skills.

The surgeon thought he could not operate without my husband dying. So I started spending 12 hours in the ICU and going home and being a mom to a newborn at night. That’s what we as women do. His brain started to swell five days later, and I was told he would likely not survive and if he did he’d be in a vegetative state. They did an operation, and he came out of it without a lot of functionality, but very quickly showed signs that we might have a different story.

It was really tough. He was in ICU for a month.

He had cardiac arrest in the middle of that. Ultimately I did the tour around town to find a rehab center for him, and put him in U of Minnesota, Ridgeview, and he started to go through a very basic but intensive journey back to walking, talking, brushing his teeth. And I still had my son with me.

At some point in that journey I had to get back to some sort of normalcy. I love what I do. So I put our son in a childcare center, and started back into the WOLF business with my team, and going to meetings in Minneapolis.

I felt literally worried all day long about them. It is woman’s stuff, what I thought—should I really do this? Am I being selfish when I should be with them? Our son was six months old.

So I went through the first day of that. And the next day my son was getting a tooth, but I took him to day care anyway. That expanded my guilt, but I called at 1, and of course it went to the front desk and I was on hold for a long time. Ultimately the call got dropped.

I called my husband’s facility and that’s even more crazy, crazy retail, and that receptionist has to find someone who may have come into contact randomly. It’s just not built for this.

“That’s when I pulled the car over. I had a vulnerable, ‘I can’t believe it’s this hard’ moment.”

“And then I sat back and thought, ‘I’m not the only one going through this.’ I went through a mental inventory of everyone I know who has someone in a care facility. And I said you know what, I’m going to change this.

I canceled the rest of my day, went to this coffee shop, and started mapping out on a yellow pad, what would this look like, and who would be the constituents that have to win?

I’ve always had that philosophy when I build a business, that everyone has to win. I leveraged the WOLF network internationally and built innovation teams of teachers, nurses, elder care, hospitals, and every single night, night after night after night in our condo building in downtown Minneapolis, these groups would come in.

I started with the whiteboard and Post-it notes, and started to build every single process of every facet of the software.

And then during the day I’d hold international virtual sessions, using the basic telephone. And I was feeding that information to our developers to build it. I did this over and over and over again.

We’re in five different major industry sectors, so we’re scaled nationally in early childhood learning centers and continuing to scale.

It increases efficiency at the centers, because they were doing the notes and communication to parents on paper.

Then there’s a record-keeping component; they have every activity for every child now stored in the cloud, and they get huge branding, because every update that goes out has their logo.

Then we’re in the hospital industry, which I didn’t anticipate going into because of the HIPAA component, the privacy laws. But we were able to work through that. In the elder care space we’re working with the largest players to bring updates to those family members, and having great success in that space as well.

And then also in the pet space—I didn’t anticipate this, but I went to four meetings and everyone would say, ‘I want this for my dog.’ We built specific components into the technology for that.

We’re generating a million and 1 updates every day, so that’s about 350,000 individuals getting an update.

We’re obviously in full revenue mode, so that’s exciting. Revenue for the year, I probably wouldn’t want to take a guess, and we’re rolling so fast.

We sell it to the center itself, and they purchase it based on a nominal subscription basis, based on the number of kids or beds and turn rate, and that gives them full use of the software.

If they want to have the ability to pull data using their own systems, we have a link, and that’s an enterprise platform fee, and then we have a third revenue model around underwriting the technology, so companies that want to create this emotional connection, they can underwrite it.

We have only scratched the surface. We are a little toddler starting to walk.

We’ve had a great ride, but I was very strategic, I held to my own values in who I sought out for money. I raised $1.5 million.

I had specific criteria around who I wanted to speak with.

1. Who has wealth that they want to use for good?
2. Are they good human beings who are going to do the right thing even when nobody’s looking?

When looking for investors, I literally went through the Rolodex and wrote down the names that had the wealth and the values, and then I asked do I know if they have anyone in their life in care, because that means they would emotionally connect, and then they’d be my partner.

I really believe it comes back to where I grew up, a small town in South Dakota. That was a powerful culture to grow up in. In that environment if you don’t enable everyone to win, you don’t win at all, because it’s such a small pond. If you think about it, if everyone doesn’t win in that pond, you don’t win.

While you may give up more initially, at the end of the day, the pie ends up being 10 times bigger than you ever imagined it.

It’s not an old-school model, that’s much more aggressive and that says, we’re going to win at the expense of you. I get zero energy from that, because it’s a false promise. At some point you’re going to run out of people that you use.

This is so much more fun. I have some amazing partners, and it’s literally like being out in corporate America without the politics. Everyone feels safe, and everyone wants to play, because they know you’re not going to do anything but enable them to win.