Landmark Health LLC’s Chief Financial Officer Brandon Kerns likes to quote the company’s motto: “House calls are back.”
“We’re enabling an amazing mission of providing medicine to a vulnerable population,” Kerns said. “I believe you do your best work when you feel connected to the mission of your company.”
Landmark Health, headquartered in Huntington Beach, provides in-home, 24/7 medical care to 160,000 chronically ill patients across 18 states, deploying advanced practitioners to patients’ homes within an hour.
Kerns, who joined in 2018, has helped oversee the company’s 500% increase in revenue, a 700% increase in profit and an employee count that’s doubled to 1,800. The company says it’s now the largest provider of home-based healthcare in the country.
Kerns’ efforts earned him the CFO of the Year Award for private companies at the Business Journal’s 14th annual event on Sept. 28.
Landmark Health
The company provides care to patients with six or more chronic conditions—a figure that accounts for 10% of Americans over the age of 65. It touts a patient satisfaction score well over 90% and studies that suggest the patients it serves survive for longer periods.
Landmark’s clients are primarily insurers—and one of Kerns’ chief duties is communicating how Landmark guarantees them savings.
“The whole premise is proactively managing health: we can leverage these expensive hospitalizations—and make a profit in the process,” Kerns said.
According to Kerns, insurers pay about $2,000 for every day a patient needs to stay in a hospital. He added that about 5% of the population accounts for 50% of healthcare costs.
“One thing we talk about a lot in business is how to make the numbers tell a story and how to turn the quantitative into the qualitative,” he added. “People buy the story—not the numbers.”
That skill set, Kerns says, comes from his financial background on Wall Street.
Wall Street Wisdom
Kerns earned his bachelor’s in applied economics and management from Cornell University and a master’s in business administration from Stanford University.
In 2010, he became a vice president at the global growth equity fund General Atlantic, which invests in value-based healthcare companies, including Orange’s Alignment Healthcare (Nasdaq: ALHC) and Oak Street Health. According to Kerns, the biggest investment it ever made was Landmark Health in 2018. Today, General Atlantic is a $60 billion fund.
Kerns brought that investor lens to his role as CFO at Landmark Health.
“I learned how to put an ROI-oriented lens all around your business to make the best decisions,” Kerns said. “As an investor, that’s exactly what you do. It allowed us to invest in the right areas of the company to ensure the return was highest from a growth, impact and profit standpoint.”
COVID-19
Kerns recalls vividly the fear he and his team felt at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Early data suggested a particularly grim outlook for elderly people with chronic conditions—Landmark’s exact demographic.
“It felt like this Black Swan event,” Kerns said. “We immediately pulled down our full revolver to weather the storm and remain on the front lines for our patients.”
The company spent millions on personal protective equipment (PPE), including “overpriced” goggles, shields and sanitizers. Landmark halted its operations for only one week in 2020 while other health organizations were “completely sidelined” for longer periods, Kerns said.
According to Kerns, COVID then became an accelerant for Landmark’s business as in-home primary care became a way to prevent infections during hospital visits.
In 2020, Landmark generated $2.5 billion in revenue.
“While we’ve grown a lot, we anticipate growing even faster over the next 24 months,” Kerns said. “This year, our revenue will exceed $3 billion—and we expect it to climb quickly from there.”
