LeRoy Jones Exited a Company. Now, he’s Using His Biz Experience to Help New Entrepreneurs Thrive

Growing up in West Oak Lane, EREflow founder LeRoy Jones always had an instinct for making it on his own.

He sold bus tokens at one point before eventually pursuing his bachelor’s degree in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and later his master’s degree in management of technology from the University of Pennsylvania.

In his role as chief technology officer at a medtech company in the early aughts, Jones was in a favorable position. He had cultivated healthy, valuable relationships with his customers and colleagues at a lucrative company.

When his employer was acquired, it changed everything.

“Once they got bought, there were other chief technology officers around,” Jones told Technical.ly. “I had a choice to make it in a new company and against them, or do something else.”

Jones opted to do something else, and started the business that would later become GSI Health. In 2003, he started brokering relationships between onshore companies seeking services and offshore companies doing technical and data work. Many of his clients became healthcare clients, which ultimately led to GSI Health focusing on selling workflow software to health systems.

Like many entrepreneurs, Jones found himself working against time and learned a valuable lesson in the process. He started this first business using approximately $100,000 in stock options he had cashed out from his CTO role at his previous job. What he had not considered was lowering personal expenses to adapt to his new budget, and he quickly ran low on funds during the early stages of GSI Health. He eventually grew the company to sustainability by moving from multiple smaller contracts to fewer large ones, but the lesson taught him a great deal about money management as an entrepreneur.

Read the full article here.

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