As a CEO of extreme growth healthcare startups (think 10x growth in 8 months, 20x growth in a year), I’ve seen a little bit of it all. I worked with Jeff for years at my last company.

Throughout that journey we were constantly challenged by extremes. In 2020, it was COVID in NYC, our headquarters. Then it was our own #blacklivesmatter awakenings and our steps and missteps on the path to more equity and inclusion. Then it was venture investor brinksmanship, which chronicles healthcare tech. Simultaneously there was the typical and atypical management dynamics that can accelerate or detonate growth, and the abrupt departure of a key leader. It even included the loss of a marquis client from which we thought we’d never recover, only to rebook them the following quarter. And, of course, it included the frenetic growth from 50 to 500 employees practically overnight.

Through it all, there was Jeff Hittner. Jeff was not just my personal coach. He was also the entire company’s coach. Starting with executive leadership and available all the way down, Jeff provided an environment that enabled us to stop, look up, breathe, and reconnect with our purpose.

For nearly all of his coaching activities he provided confidential advising that connected each participant’s experience at work with their broader goals and intentions for their life. For some, he provided additional performance-based coaching, where he coached them in concert with their manager and HR to enhance performance.

Then there’s how Jeff worked with me. I’m a values-driven leader. I believe in the people I’ve hired to live and manage in coordination with our shared values and core principles. So, when the going gets tough - and I mean really tough- you want a coach that ensures that you are STICKING to those core values and principles. Someone who knows you so deeply that s/he can anticipate your potential to slip before you can. Someone who keeps you on the field and pushes you to expand it. Someone who sees cracks in the way your team may fail to use principles to drive good decision making, and shines a light into those cracks to be sure you see it too.

That’s what Jeff Hittner was to me. Jeff was my guardian through the most thrilling, challenging, and rewarding period of my life. He kept me in the ring when I wanted to throw the gloves off. He challenged me when he knew I most needed it and least wanted it. He enabled me to do the impossible, each day. Our weekly meetings were the reason I could survive and thrive for years in an extreme growth and extreme stress company as its CEO, running a negative EBITDA business by design, in partnership with the venture capital community. The venture firms who simultaneously operated in a VUCA world, creating tempests for their portfolio companies. Each day you might save a dozen lives or be forced to lay off a dozen people or raise a million dollars or be present for a dozen meetings.

Jeff Hittner was the guardian of my heart, my principles, my vision, and my hope, in the hardest of times. My defender against my fears, my uncertainties, my self-doubt, my despair. That’s what Jeff Hittner can be to you.

— Richard Resnick, CEO Cureatr