About
Why it's called Unbound.
Most companies are bound by their own thoughts and beliefs — long after the facts have moved on.
The Idea
That isn't marketing language. It's the diagnosis behind nearly every engagement.
A chief medical officer convinced that documentation doesn't matter, because doctors don't read the chart — while the business quietly fails to bill and survive an audit. A founder convinced that a better product is the same thing as a better business. A $600M enterprise convinced its commercial team is performing, because a handful of people are succeeding on instinct alone.
None of these are intelligence problems. They're belief problems — assumptions that were reasonable once, and quietly stopped being true. And they are almost always invisible from inside the building.
Unbound exists to surface them. That takes two things most advisors don't offer together: the operating experience to know what a real commercial foundation looks like, and the willingness to say something a leadership team may not want to hear.
Katie Jackson
Founder
Charleston, South Carolina
I've spent twenty-seven years in healthcare — and the majority of it on the side of the table your customers are sitting on.
I started carrying a bag. Vascular devices, cardiac technology, endovascular grafts, surgical products. I sat in operating rooms and physician offices and learned how healthcare actually decides: who really signs, which committee isn't on the org chart, where reimbursement quietly kills a deal, and why a champion with real enthusiasm and no authority costs you nine months.
Then I built the other side. At one of the nation's largest ambulatory surgery organizations I led enterprise growth across a thirteen-state region with ten regional directors — a $600M company that, remarkably, had no defined targeting, no consistent messaging, no documented process and no CRM. We generated $40.8M in new business and exceeded goal by 34%, and the reason had far less to do with talent than with finally giving talented people a system.
After that I joined two venture-backed healthcare companies from inception, as employee #5 and employee #3, and built the commercial function from absolutely nothing both times — go-to-market strategy, messaging, competitive research, pricing and incentive architecture, collateral, sales process, CRM, the handoff into operations, comp plans, hiring profiles and the team itself. At the first, I personally closed roughly thirty independent rural practices in six to eight months, cold, to prove the model before handing it to anyone else. That company went from seed to a Series B valued near $250M.
Most recently that work has been in healthcare AI. Both companies were AI-native — using AI to reach patients directly, capture real-time health signals including vitals, run that information through multiple stages of triage, and put it in front of a provider in time to act on it. The point was keeping people out of emergency departments and hospital beds they didn't need to be in, and moving the value-based care metrics that decide whether a practice makes money. I built the commercial side of that: how it's positioned, who it's sold to, how it's priced, how it gets implemented, and how it gets paid for.
What I learned across all of it is that the gaps are identical at every scale. Seed stage or $600M, AI-native or a device in a sterile field, the missing pieces are the same six or seven things — and they are entirely fixable, in a defined number of weeks, by someone who has done it before.
How I Work
The customer never forgets the person who told them the truth.
Early in my career I sold aortic stent grafts. When a patient's anatomy wasn't right for my device, I told the surgeon so — and recommended a competitor's product that fit.
It cost me cases. What it bought was something no discount could have: the vascular surgeons at a major academic medical center began giving me first look at their patients. They handed me the sizing and evaluation work because they trusted my judgment more than they wanted to spend their own time on it. My competitors never got in the room.
That's not a story about ethics for its own sake. It's a story about how commercial advantage is actually built in healthcare, and it's the same principle I teach commercial teams today: decision makers don't buy the fanciest thing. They buy solutions to problems they have. Interview them first. Surface the pain — including the pain they haven't named. Then connect your solution to what they told you. And if it doesn't fit, say so.
On leadership
I'm a servant leader, and I mean that operationally rather than sentimentally. In leadership you work for your people — supporting them, acting as a thought partner, clearing barriers and obstacles. Your job is done when your team no longer needs you to do it.
That's also how I approach an engagement. The goal is never dependence on an outside advisor. It's a commercial function that runs correctly after I'm gone.
Background
Twenty-seven years, one industry.
Healthcare AI & venture-backed health tech
Founding commercial leader at two AI-native companies, employee #5 and employee #3. Autonomous patient engagement, real-time clinical signal capture, provider triage, Medicare Advantage risk and value-based care economics. Built from inception in both cases.
Enterprise healthcare
Enterprise growth strategy across thirteen states for one of the nation's largest ambulatory surgery organizations. De novo development, M&A, physician equity, payer and reimbursement strategy, Certificate of Need.
Medical device & IPO
More than a decade in vascular, cardiac and endovascular devices — including commercialization through a NASDAQ IPO, international expansion, and building and leading a thirteen-person sales organization.
Let's find out what's actually missing.
If something isn't working commercially and you can't quite name it, that's exactly the conversation to have.
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