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I'm Not "Just a Healthcare Person" (And Why That Label Cost Me Millions)

At some point, the story about you hardens into a label.

Mine became:

“He’s the healthcare guy.”

On the surface, that sounds fine:

Healthcare is complex.
Surviving there is a signal.

But over time, “healthcare guy” quietly turned into:

“He’s only relevant for healthcare things.”

That label has cost me real opportunity.

1. The Label Moments

Variation of the same line, over and over:

“You’ve done incredible stuff… in healthcare.”
“Our thing is in [SaaS/e-comm/AI/whatever]; you’re more healthcare domain.”
“We’re looking for someone with broader experience, not just healthcare.”

You hear enough of that and you know the pattern:

People see:
- 18+ years in a healthcare platform
They infer:
- That’s all you can do

It feels like being told:

“Great job being an expert. Now stay in your lane.”

2. How Often It Showed Up

Rough examples:

Advisory calls where interest drops the moment “state healthcare” is mentioned.
Potential roles:
- “We love your architecture background, but we’re not in healthcare.”
Consulting leads:
- “We’re worried your experience won’t translate outside your vertical.”

Lost opportunities:

Platform builds in adjacent industries (logistics, compliance-heavy B2B)
Fractional CTO roles where the complexity was similar but the domain was different
Higher-value consulting where the client couldn’t see past “healthcare”

Accumulated over time, that’s real money left on the table.

3. Skills That Clearly Transfer Outside Healthcare

Conductor wasn’t about “knowing ICD codes by heart.”

It was about:

System architecture for long-lived platforms
Operational reliability at scale
Complex data modeling
Integration design
Workflow automation
Compliance-aware design
Risk management in software decisions
Reporting and analytics under scrutiny
Team leadership / mentoring devs
Product thinking under constraints

Those skills translate to:

Fintech
Govtech
Logistics
Enterprise SaaS
Any domain where:
- systems stay in production for years
- data actually matters
- failure is expensive

Skills that transfer

4. Non-Healthcare Work (That People Ignore)

I’ve done work outside healthcare:

E-commerce / transactional systems
Data pipelines for non-medical domains
General B2B SaaS architecture
AI/LLM-based tooling around complex workflows

But if you lead with:

“I built a healthcare platform that ran for 20 years…”

The rest often gets mentally filtered out as “side gigs.”

That’s the trap:

Your biggest accomplishment becomes the only thing people see.
Everything else becomes “exceptions,” even when it’s not.

5. How the Label Cost Millions (Directionally)

The cost shows up in:

Rates
- “You’re a specialist in healthcare; outside that, you’re unproven to us.”
- Translation: lower willingness to pay for generalized architecture work.
Scope of opportunities
- Being passed over for:
  - platform rebuilds
  - architecture roles
  - large engagements
  - because “we want someone from our vertical.”
Perception of risk
- “We’d be taking a chance pulling someone out of healthcare for this.”

If you assume:

A handful of high-value opportunities per year never materialized
Each potentially worth mid-five to low-six figures

Over a decade+, the cumulative impact is easily seven figures, plausibly low eight.

That’s how you get to “millions” from one pigeonhole.

6. Why People Make This Mistake

Part of it is on them:

It’s easier to bucket:
- “Healthcare person”
- “Fintech person”
- “E-comm person”
Buyers are risk-averse.
They pattern-match:
- “Find someone who’s done this exact vertical before.”

Part of it is on me:

I let the healthcare story dominate:
- Website
- Bio
- Case studies
I didn’t push hard enough on:
- the systems side of my work
- the universal parts of architecture and operations

If you don’t actively shape your story, people default to the most obvious label.

7. How I Respond Now

When someone says:

“You’re a healthcare person,”

I answer with some version of:

“Healthcare is where I stress-tested my skills
in one of the most regulated, high-risk environments you can pick.
The value isn’t that I know a particular billing code.
It’s that I know how to design systems that survive audits, scale, and complexity
without needing to be rewritten every 5 years.”

Then I make it concrete:

Here’s how those skills map onto your world:
- Reliability → your SLAs
- Data modeling → your reporting and analytics
- Integration design → your vendor mess
- Compliance thinking → your legal/exposure risk

The key is to pivot from vertical to capability.

8. This Isn’t Just Healthcare

You see this everywhere:

“E-commerce dev”
“Fintech engineer”
“Adtech data person”

Vertical experience is:

A strength when selling into that vertical
A handicap when trying to pivot

The market is lazy:

It wants category labels, not nuanced skill breakdowns.
It undervalues people who’ve solved hard problems in one context that generalize beautifully.

9. Repositioning Now

Rebuild in progress:

Website / positioning:
- Less “I am the healthcare guy”
- More:
  - “I design systems that:
    - stay up
    - pass audits
    - scale
    - and avoid $20M rewrites.”
Case studies:
- Highlight:
  - architectural decisions
  - outcomes
  - reliability
- De-emphasize:
  - the vertical as the main character
Offers:
- Fractional CTO / architecture advisory
- Focused on:
  - long-lived platforms
  - messy integration environments
  - regulated or risk-sensitive domains (including, but not limited to, healthcare)

Healthcare is now a domain example, not my entire identity.

10. Advice for Others Trapped in One Vertical

If you’re “the [vertical] person,” decide consciously:

If you want to stay there
- Then lean into it.
- Charge specialist rates.
- Own that niche.
If you want optionality
- Start now:
  - Reframe your story around:
    - systems you built
    - capabilities
    - decision frameworks
- Collect examples outside the niche.
- Make your fundamentals the headline, not the industry.
Don’t wait 10–20 years to fix it
- The deeper your vertical roots, the harder it is to reposition.
- Start showing how your skills translate well before you need them to.

You're not "just a healthcare person," or "just an e-comm person," or whatever label they've slapped on you.

Unless you let that be the whole story.

Context → Decision → Outcome → Metric

Context: 18+ years building healthcare credentialing platform, strong track record, but consistently pigeonholed as "healthcare only" in broader opportunities.
Decision: Actively repositioning: reframe narrative from "healthcare expert" to "systems architect who proved it in a hard domain." Lead with capabilities, use healthcare as evidence.
Outcome: Conversations shifting from "wrong vertical" objections to capability discussions. New opportunities in fintech, govtech, and enterprise SaaS architecture.
Metric: Before repositioning: 70% of conversations ended with "we need someone from our vertical." After: down to 30%. Three engagements closed in non-healthcare domains within six months.

Anecdote: The Fintech Conversation That Almost Didn't Happen

In 2022, I got a referral to a fintech startup. They needed help with their core transaction platform—reliability issues, scaling concerns, integration complexity.

The intro call started with: "We saw your background. Impressive stuff. But we're not in healthcare."

I'd heard that line before. Usually it meant the conversation was over.

This time I tried something different. Instead of defending healthcare, I asked: "What's your biggest integration headache right now?"

They described a payment processor that was flaky, undocumented, and impossible to swap because it was wired directly into their core logic. Sound familiar?

I walked them through how we'd handled similar problems: adapters, contracts, circuit breakers, idempotency keys. None of it was healthcare-specific. It was just hard-won systems architecture.

By the end of the call, they'd forgotten about the vertical question. They hired me for a three-month architecture engagement.

The skills were always transferable. The problem was that I'd let "healthcare" be the headline instead of the evidence.

Anecdote: The Million-Dollar Advisory Call That Wasn't

In 2020, a venture firm reached out. They were evaluating a B2B SaaS investment and wanted an architecture review. The target company processed millions of transactions, had complex integrations, and needed to scale.

I was excited. This was exactly the kind of high-level advisory work I wanted to do more of.

Then the call happened.

"Your background is really impressive... in healthcare. We were hoping for someone with broader enterprise SaaS experience."

I tried to explain that the skills were identical. Complex data models. Integration management. Scale. Reliability under regulatory scrutiny. But they'd already mentally filed me as "wrong category."

The engagement went to someone else. The fee would have been mid-five figures for a week of work.

That call was the turning point. I realized the "healthcare guy" label wasn't just limiting my narrative—it was costing me real money. I started systematically repositioning the next week.

Mini Checklist: Escaping Vertical Pigeonholing

[ ] Identified the transferable capabilities (not just domain knowledge)
[ ] Website/bio leads with capabilities, not vertical
[ ] Case studies emphasize architectural decisions and outcomes, not industry jargon
[ ] Have practiced the "pivot to capability" response for vertical objections
[ ] Collected examples of work outside the primary vertical
[ ] Positioned the vertical as "proof of capability in hard mode," not identity
[ ] Actively pursuing opportunities in adjacent domains
[ ] Story is framed around what problems you solve, not where you've solved them