Nina French is the founder of Inflection Point, a consulting practice focused on product development, innovation, and the future of human capital management. With a career spanning more than three decades, she built her expertise from the ground up at one of the first medical review offices in the country, grew with the company through its evolution into First Advantage, and has spent the years since consulting with startups, advising large enterprise clients, and doing expert witness work in the drug testing and occupational health space alongside Bob Cadwell at Cadwell Consulting.
If you have ever wondered what it looks like to spend 30 years becoming the true definition of a subject matter expert, and then use all of that knowledge to look at the whole industry from the outside in, Nina French is the person to talk to.
Nina answered a help wanted ad in the Washington Post for a summer office manager job, became the 13th hire at one of the very first medical review offices in the country, and never looked back. What followed was a career that grew right alongside the drug testing and background screening industries themselves, from dot matrix printers and hand-stuffed envelopes to building out First Advantage’s drug testing and occupational health business over 22 years. Today she is doing the work she finds most energizing: consulting, speaking, advising startups, and looking at the industry through the external lens to ask where it is doing well and where it needs to do better.
Pro Conversation You Don’t Want to Miss!
- The startup lesson Nina learned early and never forgot: when a client asks if you can do something, the answer is yes, and then you figure out how to do it in the six weeks before they sign the contract
- Why Nina says she tries never to look at the industry through the eyes of someone inside it, and how that outside-in perspective is what makes innovation actually possible
- Her argument that we are not here to find the bad guys but to grow the good guys, and why she thinks the industry loses sight of that mission more often than it should
- The closing advice she gives to everyone from newcomers to her own kids entering the workforce: close your mouth and listen, find the people you trust, and understand that real networking is not schmoozing, it is learning who to trust and staying in touch long after you stop working together
- Her proudest personal accomplishment: having four kids in four and a half years, growing her career through all of it, and doing it without, she hopes, terrible sacrifice to herself or her family
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Connect with US:
- Les Rosen– https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesterrosen/
- Subscribe to our YouTube Channel– https://www.youtube.com/@BehindtheSCreens200
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